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First Look at Debian's Next Generation Installer

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the oohs-and-aahs dept.

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.

5 of 454 comments (clear)

  1. It's about time by bsharitt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't really care about a pretty install, I'm just glad they finally got hardware detection.

    1. Re:It's about time by awgriff279 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I can think of one good reason for Linux to have an easier installation process. I've wanted to switch from Windows for several years now. However, not having any Linux experience makes a proper installation very complicated. Consequently, I'm still using Windows until I have time to figure everything out. Unfortunartely, it's hard to learn about an OS when one doesn't have it to use. I love the idea of Linux, but until the learning curve drops on a free version, I'll probably keep using WIN98se.

  2. Graphical? by yoshi_mon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  3. A good graphical installer... by ca1v1n · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. It's about time by Fux+the+Penguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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