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Progeny Ports Red Hat's Anaconda To Debian
JoeBuck writes "According to
this message from Ian Murdock on the Debian developer's mailing list, the
Progeny folks
have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian.
They have also written a tool that "facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets". They are also engaged in other interesting unification work, and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side."
uberkludge points out an article with more details at Ars Technica.
Bill has you working this early on a Saturday morning?
Trolling is a art,
Ian Murdock is the "ian" in Debian. Deb is Debra, his wife.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
... and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side ...
I hope that all other distro creators work towards this too, so many packaging formats just confuse new Linux users, and make it even more difficult for Linux to take part in the desktop world.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
My anaconda don't want none unles you got buns, hon.
One very nice utility they might be able to use is Alien which allows you to convert from rpm's to debs and many other formats as well
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Debian do have a new installer. Petter Reinholtsen, Michael Cardenas, Tollef Fog Heen and the the others of the Debian-Installer team has made a new installer for Debian Sarge.
l .en
s taller/
r /doc/TODO?re v=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
Skolelinux uses this new installer today!:
http://developer.skolelinux.no/index.htm
URL to the new Debian Installer:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-in
Todo list for the new Debian Installer:
http://cvs.debian.org/debian-installe
This is certainly a good thing for corporations adopting Debian... especially since Redhat now has it's 1 year End Of Life policy for it's desktop products. I've always found Debian's release policy FAR more stable than almost any other distro out there, and stability is probably the main focus of most companies (far more than the latest wizz-bang features).
Hopefully this will see more corporations adopting Debian, Linux, and will result in a more unified installation process.
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However, I think the main obstacle that prevent Debian from being more widely accepted is the fact that the debian folks are very reluctant to package "wizards" and automatic configuration scripts in the distribution.
Of course, there is debconf, but its invocation is rather tricky for non Debian-savy users.
Debian's had a decent installer for years (through PGI or Knoppix). They're not the official installers (and Anaconda won't be either), but the option has always been there.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Now I'm not usually one to protect users from computers and in particular linux, but when it comes to the computer illiterate (is that spelled right :P ). I usually try and steer them towards one of the safer distros like RedHat or Mandrake, its not because I prefer either of those two for working on, its simply that debian besides being difficult to successfully install (though not as confusing as OpenBSD), features enough different packages to make anyone a little lost.
It has quite frankly always been the "power users" Linux. And some of those whould be repulsed at the thought of changing that. Some of my friends suggested that the reason debian was so good was that it only attracted the real geeks, i.e. those that could contribute and make it stronger.
In the end though what are computer for if not to make the live of both computer literate and illiterate easier. While it may anger some, the masses finally having access to Debian's enormous repository of packages, amoung other benefits, will be a good step forward. And a change that move Linux closer to eroding the market strangle hold that Microsoft Possesses.
What happened to using the Knoppix stuff in the Debian installer? I think the hardware detection of Knoppix really kicks ass.
The thing I think troubles new users most isn't the choise between package types - it's partitioning the harddisk and knowing what their hardware actually is. That last one can be helped by good hardware detection, but partitioning a disk is something else. What do you think would be best to make partitioning as easy as possible?
... and you have a /. troll!
"I'd like to put my anaconda in Portman and create progeny."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Though debian-installer, once it's done, should improve things significantly, how often do you really see the installer? Seriously, how often?
That's true enough, but it does need work. I used to defend the debian installer until recently, as I found it easy enough to use. But I recently tried to get woody installed on two new servers and had a hell of a time getting it on there. I had to do do it mostly myself in the end, by tarring and scp'ing stuff from another server. Once Debian is installed on a machine it's damn near flawless in my experience, and a real pleasure to administer. But getting it on recent machines can sometimes be a pain. It's probably more of an issue for server hardware than desktops though.
I wonder if they fixed the bugs in Anaconda that prevent it from understanding an fstab which contains either:
a LABEL= line instead of a device name
a file system type of "auto"
(and yes, I have reported both to RH.)
Perhaps they even fixed it so that when there is a failure, you have the option of going to another VC, fixing the problem, and trying again, rather than Anaconda's current behavior of "Nope. Had an error. Gonna reboot now. Definitely gonna reboot. [OK]"
www.eFax.com are spammers
It helps to realize that the debian installer has been developed to work with all of Debian's supported architectures (currently 10 - i386, m68k, sparc, alpha, powerpc, arm, mips, hppa, ia64, and s390). Such an installer has to sacrifice some beauty and convenience for flexibility and power, and those of us who only compare debian's i386 installation to that of RedHat's or Suse's need to realize this. That all said, because of the overwhelming majority of debian users who only use i386 machines, it sure makes sense to me that it would be beneficial to develop a fancy i386-only installer to satisfy the masses. There are plenty of other debian-based distros who have done just that (with varying success). Perhaps this anaconda port is the beginning of just such a project.
What is a subversion repository?
Subversion is a CVS replacement that tries to fix some of the weirdness that is CVS. I've been using it for about a year, and have found it to be very nice -- not much new to learn, and acts in a much more sane manner than CVS. It's still alpha for now (and using it ATM requires that you update fairly regularly), but it seems to be rapidly approaching the beta milestone.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I have a UNIX background, including a bit of UNIX on PCs going back 15 years. I'm a Linux newbie, but I've had great luck using Knoppix full time on an obsolete, almost diskless PC in the office.
Based on the idea that "Knoppix is just Debian" I've been trying to install Debian on a PC where Knoppix just plain works. It's driving me nuts. The network install tells me the network card isn't there even though I point it to the right driver (out of 2-3 cryptically-named choices for a RealTek compatible.) I have a slight idea of the appropriate driver options after I boot into Windows and record the interrupts and such Windows sees. Still no luck.
I juggled and made disk space and downloaded the Woody ISOs...and the Sarge ISOs where it says that Sarge will only install if you have Woody first (I think) and the jigdo docs on how the Debian updates have to be applied to the .iso files (under Linux!) and then burned.
Anyway, I'm still willing as time allows to read and learn and try and read and learn and beat this but I KNOW it should be easier because KNOPPIX IS EASIER!
Yeah, I know I can install Knoppix on a hard disk. I want to try and learn "real" Debian.
Yeah, I know I can ask for help on the Debian forums. I have searched there for ideas. Asking for help is another thing I'll do when I get a round tuit.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Open up /etc/networks/interfaces to add/edit/remove your network interfaces. Contact me on Jabber (see www.unrealtower.org for address) if you need more help.
And exactly WHAT businesses do you recommend operating system software to? The business your dad runs?
What do you consider so wrong with RPM? Dependencies? Use apt-rpm, yum, or even redhat's own up2date. Have you even looked at redhat in the last 2 years?
For most businesses, debian is NOT an option. They want a company pushing the product. They want a solution...not just an operating system. They want tech support. They want to know somewhere there is a boardroom with a bunch of guys making decisions. Like it or not, those are the type of things businesses look for.
Python as a required part of the base install... Some will dance, others will puke.
Also, tiny root partitions w/ everything other than /bin /lib /etc mounted did not work w/ Ananconda - at least with RH 7x. You needed a couple hundred MBs free in / to install. This required some fancy "behind the scenes" work - from a console between installer stages - for me to get my 6.2 boxes up to 7.0.
Of course, if you throw the works into /dev/hda1 - there's no prob! Unless you are worried about local priv escalation and other *NIX security issues...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This seems awfully backwards to me. I don't mean to start a ditsro flame war, but as a Debian user I've *never* had to use a Redhat package. Debian's repository is ridiculously huge (actually, too huge, in my opinion) and is well maintained by the packagers and the high Debian standards.
If anything, Redhat should be making it easier to have debs and rpms live side by side on their machines. In fact, Redhat's whole Fedora thing just seems like an attempt to recreate Debian. Why bother?
This is getting a little bit off-topic, but take gnome for example. Gnome properly requires dozens of different libraries to accomplish what it needs - but many times I hear people bitch and moan about gnome's "dependency hell". I am throughly convinced the people who are complaining about that are just the people who's distros don't have (or aren't employing) proper library dependency checking, upgrading, versioning, etc. And what do you know, that's exactly the sort of thing Debian solves beautifully.
http://www.talknerdy.org
Alien is good for the occasional package where dependencies are a minor concern.
.rpm files can already be handled directly in Debian (not by apt) if they are LSB compliant, but the only thing these packages depend on is the LSB package that provides support for the version of the LSB specification that is required by the .rpm.
.rpm files on a Debian based system. And it may only be a small stretch to add support for managing an RPM based distrobution on another machine using APT from a Debian based distrobution or vice versa.
.deb and .rpm files on the same system is a little more of a stretch. In which case the phrases:
The problem with Alien is you lose the dependency tracking information during the package conversion, so it is not good on a larger scale.
I believe
Viewing the quote with that context in mind and including the next statement in the quote:
"We are also working with various parties to add/merge RPM support
into the mainline APT, to allow Debian- and RPM-based
distributions to be managed using a single APT codebase, and
possibly even to allow Debian and RPM packages to coexist side by
side. This work also aims to merge our various APT extensions
(e.g., support for authenticated APT repos) into the mainline APT.
It is our hope that a distribution-independent Anaconda and
a distribution-independent APT (plus, eventually, a distribution-
independent configuration framework) will, along with a
stronger LSB, help unify further the various Linux distributions."
Relatively speaking, it is probably only a small stretch once the codebase is unified to add support for management of LSB compliant
To add full support for handling of
"possibly even to allow Debian and RPM packages to coexist side by side"
and
"along with a stronger LSB"
become key phrases.
Later, Seeker
I'll quote from Fedora Core 0.95 Release Notes at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/ :
/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file.
The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) now supports installing packages from apt and yum repositories as well as local directories. This includes dependency solving and obsoletes handling. Additional repositories can be configured in the
Fedora Core is the new name for the free Red Hat distribution.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I don't know if you've ever actually worked with anaconda, but (like other open source software) it's possible to hammer it do whatever you need. There is support in anaconda for non i386 archs (s390, sparc, and IIRC, vestigial traces of the alpha installer). Yes, it's going to be a pain to implement code to handle new archs (like the PPC), but there are enough examples of how to do it that it should be possible.
:) It's going to enable some cool stuff to be done with Debian.
The one thing that makes me downright ecstatic in all this is the prospect of being able to use the "kickstart" feature of anaconda for Debian. RH's kickstart is pretty damn flexible (as opposed to FAI, FreeBSD's unattended install mode, Solaris's jumpstart, and even the Winders solutions that are available). With the kickstart, it's possible to build and install a customized system from modular parts (instead of having to rely on image based installs)... and that makes it easy to slide in updates or quickly implement new install types.
Hardware autodetection is abstracted out via kudzu (yes, it's a pain after the OS is installed, but at install time it's a godsend and makes probing hardware programmatically much easier).
On top of that, you can hack up anaconda to do some other "interesting kickstartish type stuff" (in the words of Matt Wilson).
Kudos for the Progeny boys for making this available.
Tip of the Day If you're having trouble figuring out what kernel modules you need, boot from a Knoppix cd. The output from dmesg should tell you modules you need.