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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.
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!
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."
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
I don't really see the logic. Linux in general used to get beat up severly because of installation difficulties. Over the years many distros heard these complaints and addressed them by developing better and better installers. Today, there are numerous distros available that have such excellent installers that installation is a moot topic, except for Debian, Slack and Gentoo.
Most, if not all, of these better installers are open source GPLed programs. It seems to me that "logical progression" would be Debian taking one or many of these better installers and adapting them to Debian. Instead they choose to reinvent the wheel and have produced a crude installer whose interface was passe years ago. Where is the logic?
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
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.
-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.
/dev/null. The debian installer was never the problem. It isn't harder than slackware, but dselect really, really sucks.
-Dselect needs to be sent to
-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...
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
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
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.
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/
Everyone on here is bitching away how the Debian 'installer' sucks. I think what you mean is their old installer sucked ass. How can you call this one shity, when it has everything but pretty pictures? Text is nice, and I for one don't need a picture for everything while I install a system. How can you say its only up to 'redhat 7' when it has everything redhat9.2 has and more. Realize that this is a new installer, this story is not called 'Lets bitch about the 'installer' and assume it still sucks like the old one'. This is not a flaimbait.... I just want people to know that debian did what was needed. A new installer, and look a new installer is what they've come up with. Understand something before you make statements about it. The installer 'is up to redhat7.0 standards'. Lets avoid ignorant statements, and obviously flaimbaits. This is not a flaimbait, its just my discust of having all these mod 3+ posts that talk about it sucking etc etc.. I think we all know the old one sucked, becaise it was extremely old, broken and missing important features.
No, this is
There are a number of good reasons not to do the install in Graphics mode. It's not necessary. It would introduce unecessary complexity in a crucial operation (installation) that doesn't require such complexity - that alone is good reason to veto the idea. Setting up the video properly is one of the most difficult things to do, and when you have a graphics mode installer a failure in setting that up properly on auto becomes a fatal error rather than a minor inconvenience. Plus a lot of Linux installations don't use graphics mode anyway - why go to the windows way of requiring a graphics card on machines that should be running headless and accessed via telnet and/or console cables only? Plenty of people use linux on machines that don't have a graphics system of any kind, and that's fine, in many cases it's a good thing. Why make an installer that won't work on a sizable portion of the machines that will run the software you're installing? How much sense does that make?
If it ain't broke don't fix it is an axiom for a reason - and making a graphic mode installer would be a great example of fixing something that isn't broke. The Debian installer could certainly be improved though, and from the article it seems they've made excellent choices in deciding what needs to be improved - and what isn't broken and shouldn't be fixed.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
On another front, is there any reason why the installer cannot let you choose in between GRUB and LILO like Anaconda does?
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.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
"Just use NetBSD, all you need is two floppy disks to install it from network."
Which begs the question... what is a floppy disk?
--Richard
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.
I haven't seen any distro that does CD burning very easily though, so the problem isn't localized to debian by any means.
It's called Knoppix...