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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.
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
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.
... and you have a /. troll!
"I'd like to put my anaconda in Portman and create progeny."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
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.
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..."
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.