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.

Comments

What Debian needs

[Espectr0]

-Fork for architectures: i know lots of people don't like to wait for upgraded packages because they break on different architectures. This is what's happenning with xfree 4.3 not being available. If there were a debian-x86 fork, it would use optimization and wouldn't be behind other distros in package versions.

-Dselect needs to be sent to /dev/null. The debian installer was never the problem. It isn't harder than slackware, but dselect really, really sucks.

-Loose the restrictions a little bit: why mplayer is missing and xine not? Mplayer has been 100% gpl since 0.9 and it was rejected from getting a package because of ffmpeg, which xine also has.

-More customization: the USE variable of Gentoo is really powerful, and it would be great when apt getting source packages. I want package X, and it wants me to install package Y that is optional and i dont want.

-Updated versions! Slackware is current, and it's stable.

-Re-do the stable, testing and unstable package list: they should only contain base, critical packages. So i want to run the latest kde with my stable setup? Is kde 2.2 more stable than 3.1? The security bugs fixed between them say no (yeah, i know they backport, but those packages never get the same QA) User-level desktop apps which aren't critical shouldn't be restricted in the same stable, testing and unstable trees, or at least they could mix and match.

And lot of other things i can't remember...

Knoppix

[PurpleBob]

The easiest Debian installer is Knoppix.

You boot from a Knoppix CD, and all you have to do is install a base system and apt to your hard disk, and you've got a Debian system that's already configured.

They should acknowledge this fact and officially support Knoppix as an install method for desktop users. Then they can still focus their installer on people who want to install Debian on an Alpha over their serial line.