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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.
I don't really care about a pretty install, I'm just glad they finally got hardware detection.
I wonder why isn't it not yet graphical? Any reasons at all?
While still not a graphical installer (and the article does a good job of explaining why that's not a priority)...
Who ever said we needed a graphical installer? There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer. And for installing small footprint it's always best.
And besides, this is the logical progression. First you do the text installer, then you move on to a graphical installer if you so desire. Not the other way around.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
A good installer for a vanilla desktop user would take advantage of all the hardware on their system. It should detect your sound card, and then play a sound that says "hey, we found your sound card!" and it should let you use your USB mouse, show all this stuff on your display in such a fashion that acknowledges the existence of the video card, etc.
Basically, it should be more like Knoppix.
Now, I wouldn't want to lock the user, who may not be a vanilla desktop user and may not even have a mouse or video card on the machine, into this setup, but it sure would be nice to have the option, wouldn't it?
Knoppix is wonderful and all, but it leaves behind some artifacts of the live CD setup that can make package upgrades (which users ought to be able to do graphically, and with little pain) very painful. If we could get stuff like this in the base Debian distribution, we'd be a lot closer to Debian being sufficiently user-friendly that we could hand a disc to grandma without fear.
*prepares for the "get redhat" flames*
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Personally, I've never had good luck with Debian. I know lots of people love it, and bully for them, but I have never been able to get a Debian system up and running to my satisfaction. I believed this was a personal failure until I succeeded two times with Gentoo, which is to Debian as Alaska is to Montana, in terms of frontier cred. Anyway, I agree that things that are dumb about the Debian installer could be improved, but I'm still a little worried that an installer my mama could run isn't right around the corner...
As everyone knows, Debian is maintained by an organization of volunteers. When people working on the distribution support users, it takes away from the time that they could be spending to improve the distribution. Therefore, it makes sense for them to not make Debian open for anybody to install. If someone can't make it through an installer that requires some attention and knowledge on the part of the user, then they should probably be using a commercial distribution that offers support for money or whatever. That's one of the things I like best about Gentoo's root shell installer. It immediately gets rid of people that are intimidated by that sort of thing, and prevents them from sucking up tons of attention on mailing lists or forums. The difficulty of the installer should be like those little signs in front of rides at amusement parks: "You must be this tall to ride."
The target audience of Debian doesn't need a graphical installer, so there's really no reason to put one in. If you want the easy graphical installer, perhaps you should ask yourself why you chose Debian in the first place. Besides, with distributions like Debian and Gentoo, using the installer is more likely than not a one time thing, because you can upgrade the version of your operating system without bothering with the installer. I'm all for installer improvements that save time for the core users of a distribution, but revising the installer to open the distribution to a new class of users should not be entered into lightly
I prefer to go through the difficult installation process Debian is known for - I know what hardware I have and can update drivers in the kernel if necessary, manually. So has does an installer perform? How about detecting a p4p800 deluxe motherboard with a 3com 3C940 nic? Unfortunately not. The disadvantage with installer is that users generally become lazy because of the very nature of an installer. It's purpose is to automatically detect a user's hardware - if it does not, then a user will likely give up and not naturally, say, update a drive in the kernel.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I don't want to be a troll, but I thought the whole idea about open source is you can copy from each other and not reinvent the wheel. If Mandrake has a really good hardware detection, then why are these dudes writing something from scratch?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Good theory, but the article explains why it doesn't work in practice: Debian has to be installable on 11 different architectures, and they have gone for a lowest common denominator approach (instead of, say, having a different, graphical install for x86 and maybe ppc).
/proc.
I agree with other comments. I can do without the graphics, but it's nice to whip through hardware detection without opening another console and digging through
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
For your information, it's a great deal easier to add a gui to an installer than it is to get the underlying functionality of the installer right. Debian is certainly not short of people who can program GUIs.
Somebody at Debian has probably thought about whether a GUI would really add value to an installer. He/she presumably came to the conclusion that it adds little or none. He/she is probably right.
I mean, once you install a "server" operating system using a generic kernel, then go and recompile the kernel to include support for whatever hardware you have in your server.
What exactly is the purpose of hardware detection in this case? You won't be using X11, USB, or any of that stuff that needs to be "detected" on a server, and by installing Linux in the first place you accept the responsibility that you know what you are doing.
Not everyone uses linux for just servers. And even on servers, installing custom kernels doesn't scale well if you support a large number of machines of different types.
I love autodetection. I spent a lot of time setup Redhat kickstart installations that ended up being supported on a variety of hardware. Should a machine require manual work just because this particular machine included an intel NIC instead of a 3com?
I know what I'm doing. I can compile a custom kernel, but it might not be the best use of my time.
Gentoo now has "Genkernel" which generates a Kernel configuration...and I must tell you, it is utter crap ! I'm OK with graphical installers and auto-detect and all, but I know my hardware and I much prefer being able to do it by hand and remove the unneeded crap...so it needs to be just an option!
While seleting modules by hand may not be confusing for non-newbies, it's still annoying. Sure, I know exactly which modules I need, and I could select them all by hand, but I shouldn't have to. One of the great things about RedHat's installer (I know, I know, RedHat is dead) is the kickstart option. I can put in a disk, kickstart a net install, take the disk out, and move on. And barring any unusual hardware, I'll come back to a fully installed system. This is great for bulk-installing machines.
I'm glad to see Debian has moved closer to this goal by doing module auto-detection.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Installation difficulties != graphical installer. Installation difficulties are due to a bad user interface.
OpenBSD has a great installer for the tecnically inclined, while dselect is just plain annoying. You have so many keys to remember just to select stuff, and the screen's view keeps changing.
Redhat's text mode interface is quite nice, 'cept it doesn't provide all the right questions or choices all the time. If i select something and its dependencies aren't met, it should ask me right away, "Do I want to add this or forget about my selection." I shouldn't have to think, I selected some packages before, and these are the missing dependencies over all of them, now I can go back and guess which ones i fooked up on.
The autodetect and what not is important too, getting rid of stupid questions like, "do you have a 3 button mouse." If there was a way it could figure it out, do it damnit. And this project at LEAST strives for the autodetection. Hopefully, it'd streamline the package selection process and what not.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
On another front, is there any reason why the installer cannot let you choose in between GRUB and LILO like Anaconda does?
I haven't seen any distro that does CD burning very easily though, so the problem isn't localized to debian by any means.
To further prove this point, ever been to an art gallery? Ever noticed that the paintings aren't always very useful or good? I went to an art gallery once, the only reason that I got anything out of the experience was because of a self guided tour, which had words!I whole heartedly agree. I think that the next generation of installers will make software suggestions based on hardware cofigurations. For example:This type of a suggestion works well with all types of users. Here's another example.
Take care...