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First Look at Debian's Next Generation Installer
An anonymous reader writes "Over at LinMagAu There is an interesting look at the new beta version of the Next Gerneration Debian Installer. Putting aside the fuss around Ian Murdock, Progeny and Anaconda, this is how Debian is constructing the future of what is known to be it's Achilles heel. It's a well done beginning." While still not a graphical installer (and the article does a good job of explaining why that's not a priority) the installer now autodetects hardware, streamlining module selection, which was previously one of the more confusing parts of the install for newbies.
Why does it silently switch to Dvorak when you select diff languages?
"If you select "English (USA)" you'll be safe, but be warned that if you choose "English (Australia)" or "English (United Kingdom)" your keyboard will switch to the Dvorak layout! Not quite what most people expect."
Amen brother! FreeBSD still uses a text mode installer, and I have to say that I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Not sure about XP, but even Windows NT/2000 does the initial install from a Curses-like interface.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
it works, if you stick with woody, it's pretty much a "hit enter" proposition. It's not as good as libranet or knoppix/gnoppix/morphix. But given the "Debian Mindset" it is a step forward.
~corporate tool, but employed~
First Look: Next-Generation Debian Installer
The Debian installer has been considered its Achilles heel for a long time, but in the last couple of months things have really been heating up in Debian-installer-land. Ian Murdock recently announced to the Debian project that Progeny, the Debian-based distro that created the Progeny Graphical Installer, was dropping PGI in favour of porting Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian. But things haven't been sitting still within Debian itself either, with frantic work over the last couple of months to get the next-generation Debian Installer to the point where Sarge (Debian 3.1) can be released.
A Debian-Installer Debcamp in Germany in September saw many of the core developers get together for several days of intensive coding, with the result that Beta 1 of the new installer is now ready for the world to come and gawk, and poke, and kick the tyres, and even take it for a spin around the block. It's still changing on a daily basis but the developers want as many people as possible to give it a whirl and report back any problems they have.
So, for your edutainment and complete with pretty pictures, I present to you this first look at the next-generation Debian Installer.
Installer Rationale
To understand some of the design decisions that have been made with respect to the installer and why it's taken so long to get to this point, it's important to know a little about the Debian project itself. For many people this section will be rehashing old ground so if you just want to get to the guts of it skip ahead now to the next section, "Getting The Installer".
The long and the short of it is that Debian is committed to supporting multiple processor architectures. It's famous for being the most broadly deployable Linux distro (and possibly operating system) in existence, running on at least 11 distinct architectures. Nobody has more expertise in porting software to different platforms than the Debian project.
While that causes some problems when distributing normal user-space software, they're difficulties that can be worked around: for example, a package written in C needs to compile on all 11 architectures, but not all architectures use the same C libraries. No problem, Debian's server farm just autobuilds the package with different libraries for each platform.
When it comes to an installer, though, things are different. An installer needs to be bootable on all platforms, but different platforms boot in totally different ways. x86 systems start up and look for local disks in a certain way, Power Macintosh systems do it another way, and S/390 is different again. Then consider that the job of an installer is to figure out what local hardware you have available and setting up the system in a way that will work on that hardware. How does it detect the hardware? Will a detection system that works on one architecture fail horribly on another?
Probably.
But it gets worse: think about what happens when you first launch an installer. It boots up and displays some stuff on screen, right? But some machines use an AGP or PCI graphics subsystem, while others may not have a graphics subsystem at all, only a serial interface with a character-based console. What should the installer do if it starts up and finds the host system doesn't even have a graphics card installed?
The more you think about questions like that, the more it'll bake your noodle when you consider the task faced by the Debian Installer team.
In essence, they are trying to make a universal installer that will run on any architecture with any hardware detection method and any display system.
So people may bitch and moan about how it's taken so long for Debian to produce a "pretty" installer while other distros have had one for years, or they may say that Debian should just adopt a third-party installer like PGI or Anaconda, but that doesn't really take the big picture into account. Debian's mantra is to be the Universal Operating System, a
Whether or not it's text-based won't really make a difference with this installer. I imagine you will have a choice of front-ends that all do the same thing when this moves out of beta. From the article:
"...but due to its modular design the developers can stick almost any front-end on it they like. There are already test builds using a GTK (ie: Gnome-style) GUI with mouse-driven menus etc, and if you really wanted to you could build a front-end using anything from a Braille device to Macromedia Flash."
Debian's installer has to work across at least 11 different arches. It has to be endian clean and work equally well on 32 and 64 bit architectures. It must also be able to cope with http, ftp, and cdrom installs. Last but not least, there is the multitude of Debian packages and the categories they come in.
It was probably easier to write something from scratch than adapt say RedHat's installer to meet those requirements. It also doesn't sound as crude as your making it out to be. This installer has hardware detection and automatic module configuration. A pretty front-end can be wrapped around it and the article says that experimental gtk installers based on it already exist. A multi-arch installer is Not Easy.
Now, I haven't clikced through it in a couple months, but I hardly remember setting more than *where* it was going in the text-mode UI. All the actual configuration (localization, components, network settings, additional drivers etc. are set from a GUI after first reboot. (Unless you need them to load a 3rd party driver to for SCSI or RAID).
Anyway, on the Linux side I can only compare it to the RedHat installer, which I think was quite nice. Since the article is slashdotted, I don't know more about Debian's than what is in the summary....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The right thing to do is what Windows has always done: make it easy to change.
XFree 4.3 has an extension called randr that allows changing resolution and vertical refresh on the fly, and the latest versions of both Gnome and KDE now include control panel applets for setting resolution and refresh rate. How long it will take for that to trickle down into Debian stable is anyone's guess, but the Linux community at large is already there.
0 1 - just my two bits
www.dvorak-keyboard.com/
b/c Mandrake runs only on i386 while Debian supports 11 architectures? Which has always been the only reason for the state of the Debian installer anyway
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Well, first of all, XFree 4.3 is available. I've been using it on Debian for ages - you just neet to add a Debian Experimental line to your sources.list Secondly, getting software to work on many architectures usually involves fixing bugs and poor assumptions. The many architectures of Debian helps QA, rather than hinder it, even if it does take longer. As far as dselect goes, I've been running Debian for 3 years now, and I used dselect exactly once - my first install. You're not forced to use it in any way.
Stable doesn't just mean it doesn't crash. It means it doesn't *change*. That's the point of the stable install. You know that installing the security packages won't introduce some behaviour that you weren't expecting, which a lot of people think is damned important.
New versions of software are by definition unstable. Things change, configs become out of date, new libraries are needed. If you don't mind those things, use Debian Unstable. Its packages are not only up-to-date, but they're also damned good quality.
WinXP still has the curses-like insterface as well. I get this all the time from friends I'm trying to convert, "why doesn't Linux have a nice installer like Windows XP?" I tell them that the Windows XP SETUP is not the Windows XP INSTALLER.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Mandrake is available on three or four arches. One of them is Mac (big-endian), the other is AMD64 (64-bit). Its installer can install from http, ftp or cdrom. Mandrake deals with its own multitude of packages and categories and repositories through urpmi which is basically a port of apt-get, so rewriting it to use apt-get should be trivial. Finally, it's GPLed (unlike, for example, Yast).
It's called "a KNOPPIX CD". Fire it up, type "su knoppix-install", choose "debian system", and sit back and enjoy. The only enhancement they probably ought to make is to have a prominent menu-item for this feature.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
You must be doing something wrong. My epro 10/100 works just by loading the module during the install and the CD writer "just works". /me wonders what is wrong with you?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
It's called Knoppix...
try Knoppix or one of the many other live Linux CDs. Download the ISO image (or pick it up somewhere for $3), burn, & reboot. Instant Linux & it doesn't mess with your existing hard drive (unless you specifically ask it to, of course..)
When you are done playing with the hundreds of included programs, pop out the CD & reboot to windows... no mess no fuss, nothing to install, nothing to mess up.