Slashdot Mirror
Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review
Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."
the installation seemed to contain a lot of stuff I didn't know. At least they had recommended choices to keep some unwanted stuff from happening.
That said, much of that DOESN'T have defaults. What's the default langauge/keymap? If you have an odd keyboard you could find yourself in serious trouble. What's the default timezone? And I don't think the machine name/root password/user name/etc have good defaults either.
I think they did a great job, and if the user wants the defaults they can just hit "enter" a bunch of times like you have to in so much software. The "all defaults" setting doesn't really start to apply untill you get to package selections and configurations. Windows does it the same way, and it makes great sense.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You most likely used the Network Install from Debian 3.0 (boot-floppies) which is 2 years old. The current installer is available from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ for testing and fixes most of the problems you mentioned with respect to autodetection, etc. It has worked well for me for the past year.
- new easy to use partitioner that supports automatic partitioning and LVM
- grub as the default boot loader on i386
- wireless networking support
- 2.4.25 kernel, with SATA support and security fixes
- support for the XFS filesystem
- support for these architectures: i386, ia64, sparc, m68k (mac), mips, alpha
- fully translated to 25 languages
- a boot logo (by Mark Riedesel)
- a draft installation manual
Debian's current installer is absolutely horrible. The Solaris text based installer is even easier than Debian's! I've lost more than a few potential converts based just on the fact that they got lost trying to figure out how to do something simple like setup their network card. Off to Mandrake they went and they're happy. Oh well.
The look ncurses-style tui wasn't intended to be changed. All the actual code, questions, autodetection, etc are new though. Also, the installer is now modular which should help keep Debian from having to take years to fix the installer between releases like was the case with the previous installer.
you can install debian over the serial port on x86 boxes.
Try that with a GUI!
Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.
If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.
That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer courtesy of Red Hat.
Yes Billy, you can. For instance, assuming you have a stable and an unstable source for your packages, you could do:
apt-get install ssh/unstable
and it'll get the version from unstable.
I've installed debian on 2 boxes. You need some other unixy box to start with where you:
/etc/xinetd tftp entry to find out where the root is) Also install the tftp client so you can `tftp localhost` then 'get tftpboot.img' to make sure you have access to the file.
:/` in my bootparams file.
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range.
1) Make sure tftpd is installed. Put the 'tftpboot.img' in the tftp root (check
2) Install dhcpd. Give the SGI box an entry like this:
host babybox {
hardware ethernet nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn;
fixed-address 192.168.0.51;
}
You can get your hardware ethernet address in the boot command monitor on the SGI.
3) You may need bootparamd, but I can't figure out exactly what it's doing. I just put `192.168.0.51 =
4) There are 2 odd instructions on debian site that are necessary if you're installing using the 2.4 linux kernel as host:
echo 1 >
and
echo "2048 32767" >
Hope this helps!
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Yes, the problem with Arabic and Hebrew is noted in Beta 3's errata. It'll get fixed.
Rick Moen has a great page of alternative Debian installers if you don't like this one.
Debian can be installed over the FreeBSD kernel: here's some more information on that
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Hell NO! I like/love Knoppix BUT when I recently decided to install a Debian based desktop for someone else, I tried both types of knoppix installs and a pure debian install from beta2. Beta2 won hands down, because afterwards I could figure out how to get my packages into order, updating them and getting what I wanted. With Knoppix you end up with a hodge-podge of sources that don't really sync up that well together and lots of setup stuff that can make it more ackward to go and adjust things. This debian-installer is great and seems to be developing very nicely (i.e. the developers seem to be able to do things within the framework without going insane), I wouldn't be surprised if Knoppix bases their next installer rewrite on it (if they have another rewrite). I admit I'm not Bob User, but I hate to think what would probably have happened to Bob User when security updates came around, or anything else got them into apt.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Can you mix unstable and stable apps together with apt-get?
Yes, as others mentioned. And you might want to check out Debian Backports. It is a repository of packages for debian stable that are newer than what is provided in the stable distribution, but designed to work with stable.
The packages in backports are built to work on stable, so they use the libraries and stuff within stable wherever possible. The package selection is smaller than if you just started pulling stuff from unstable, but the changes to your system and risks to stability are minimal.
to get rid of the toolbar up top, Right click on it, add a toolbar to the bottom, then right click on the toolbar up top and click delete toolbar (or something of that nature). Top bar gone :-)
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.
...
Mandrake's installer is in perl and perl-GTK2. A platform that doesn't have perl isn't a real unix, and one that can't run perl-GTK2 isn't going to be worthwhile for GUI use
And, considering the community is reviving the sparc/sparc64 port of Mandrake and maintaining the alpha port, the Mandrake community would welcome help in porting DrakX to the architectures it doesn't currently support.
Come on, it has been stated multiple times that the new Debian installer, when done, can easily be hooked up to a fancy GUI frontend!
From the "About the Debian Installer" page:Anyway, it's still in development, and much that's being changed is happening behind the scenes. When the time comes you will see a GUI frontend, I'm sure! Of course, it doesn't stop there.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Firstly to install a very basic Linux system which will allow you to get onto the Internet and download all the latest packages.
Second use is to install a system from the CD tailored to your needs.
In both these cases I feel Debian's installer requires too much fiddling around. What it needs is menu with "Typical role for this installation" and options like:
[] Desktop computer
[] Web Server
[] Database Server
[] Minimal install
[] Custom
The custom option would allow you to setup the packages you require and allow you to load one of the presets to base your custom selections on.
Also why can't the installer be a bit more intelligent and read the current disk layout and make some clever suggestions?
If I can't get a working XF86Config file, I generally follow the procedure in the FreeBSD handbook. It's surprisingly simple, and (usually) works just fine on Linux, although it does require some hand-editing of the generated file.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.