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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."
Why not have a single selection at the beginning that says "Install all defaults"? Hit that, let the installer figure out all your hardware settings, and come back an hour later with a fully installed OS.
Maybe throw in a warning that the whole disk will be wiped out, but how much user interaction does an installer really need?
I have been pwned because my
With RH losing a lot of stock in the tech world, I foresee Debian becoming more mainstream. The only problem about this is, Debian is usually an elitist group of users. Many users of Debian before I switched (06/2003), would just say... "You use Redhat? What are you a girl or something?" I just told them, "Bah... you stink! RPM is the coolest thing ever!" Well, I wish I could have gone back to the days when I was stupid. :) The new Debian install almost makes it as easy to install as Windows. I don't think a GUI is needed for installing an OS onto a machine, plus it causes overhead in the installer and on the disk.
IMHO... someone should create a "smart" installer that says... "I see you have Windows installed. I can remove it for you. Please press return."
I don't think it would be any problem. A good scripter/programmer could easily figure it out. I wish I could...
"Debian... Next to Jesus, it's the only way to Heaven"
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
I really like the Debian installer. I'm used to it (on x86 AND ppc), and it just works for me. I know what to expect, I know that I don't have to get graphics working to install the distro. The more I use it, the better it seems.
Then again, I've never used a graphical installer.
My other car is first.
Joe User uses windows. To get Joe User to use Linux you would have to make an installer that doesn't require a HOWTO.
Repeal the DMCA!
Several times to install Debian/Gnu on my SGI Indy. As a relative cherry when it comes to goofy installs this is a problem. The websites I have found all seems to take for granted nuances I should probably already know but are left unsaid. Suuch things as WHICH machine to set up WHAT file on and suchlike. The Indy is an r4400 with 96 meg and a 4.3 Gig HD. It does NOT boot from disk. Instructions aimed at knuckleheads such as myself need this goofy level of detail to learn things y'know. I do have a pretty decent redhat 9 machine on the network here that is supposed to be used for the TFTP bootloader but there is detail about setting that up that is also left unsaid. It would be really cool if someone actually tried to understand that there are geeks out there that dont know things and want to learn.
Dammit.
Stupid Humans.....
...especially if they put Kudzu or something like it into the mix to autodetect things like Knoppix does.
/home directory. Anyone who doesn't do this is asking for trouble. Knoppix's knx-hdinstall doesn't, and requires some wizard-level incantations to repair.
I especially like the option in the auto-partitioner for a separate
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I certainly hope that Debian's Arabic support isn't as bad as that in the installer- the letters don't connect! They're typed from left to right! This would be like having the English installer say something like the following:
(ASU)hsilgnE ni deecorp ot siht esoohC
Except that its even worse - imagine all the i's seperated from their dots, which are written separately next to them in linear order. And even that would be less ridiculous.
As someone who does use Arabic frequently when computing, it's something less than a stunning endorsement of Debian
I've been playing around with various operating systems on an old dual-processor Sun Ultra2 Creator3D, including Debian.
By far the easiest and quickest install was NetBSD and OpenBSD... if it weren't for lack of SMP support (OpenBSD) or Creator3D ffb framebuffer support (NetBSD), I'd stick with one of them and be happy.
Gentoo required a copy of the install guide at hand, but it went smoothly until the time came to unpack the stage from the LiveCD... all three were corrupted, choked and died in mid un-tar. I'm going to see if there are newer LiveCD ISO's available, but it's not a rolicking start, and requires too much command line fiddling to start the show. Still, apart from the abject failure to install the tarballs, the process itself is very straight forward.
Unlike Debian, which has a miserable interface that's at once too convoluted and too spartan to be of any use, and is rotten at picking reasonable defaults. I spent the better part of two days trying to get a booting, networked operating system out of the damn thing.
Maybe Splack, Aurora and SuSe are better... haven't tried them yet, but compared to NetBSD's clean ASCI console installer, the two popular Linux distros come up way short. (Solaris isn't much of an improvement.)
Here's the trick: simplify and automate wherever you can, and pick reasonable defaults while offering options to users who know what they're doing. No need for bright, shiny MS-DOS psuedo-GUI's, just a reasonable curses-based interactive program that prompts the user when needed, but otherwise goes and installs a working operating system on its own with minimal intervention required, but available if wanted.
SoupisGood Food
Hmm, I have XFree86 4.3.0 and linux 2.6.3. Both installed from packages (actually I compiled 2.4.3 for this machine, but my server uses the stock debian 2.6.3 kernel).
Anyway, yeah Debian Stable is old. That's a feature.
Debian unstable, however, is bleeding edge, but not broken. It's great. Much newer than any other distro.
Debian gives the user the choice of old packages/high reliability or new packages/average reliability. That's better than semi-recent pcakages/semi-decent reliability that Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, and SuSE offer.
Thanks, apt*.
* Other distros have apt, but Debian's is better because the debian developers use it properly. I've NEVER had a dependency problem (problems yes, but they weren't too bad). Apt is the best feature of any operating system I've ever used.
My other car is first.
Windows is for the Mainstream crowd. I mean, most people don't care about Freedom or choice in software. Sometimes you have to deal with a "hard" installer to get a "better" OS.
I was raised on MacOS. I have no problems with anything under Linux.
I am good at reading, though. If you like reading, and don't mind having to think, Linux is for you. Otherwise, it's probably not worth it.
My other car is first.
The funny thing is, I just installed Debian today from a daily. Didn't know Beta 3 was released, but I'm sure it was about the same thing. In fact, I'm typing this message in vim through w3m (or vice versa?). I was struggling getting a good console framebuffer setup in Freebsd. As far as I can tell 800x600 is the highest resolution it will go, unfortunately. So... then I tried Gentoo knowing linux had much better framebuffer support. A couple failed attempts to boot later and it was time to go to bed. Whipped out the Debian-Installer cd I burned a couple days ago and was up and running in 20 minutes. Being a noob, I foolishly recompiled my kernel when I probably just had to set vga=792 in grub. But I got a fresh-er kernel and a new system in less time that it took to unsuccessfully get things configured in FreeBSD or Gentoo. To it's credit, though, FreeBSD was setup in about 20 minutes also. I just couldn't for the life of me get a higher resolution console to work with my hardware.
Overall, I'd say Debian provided what I wanted. But I'm a little disturbed that there were ports in FreeBSD that I couldn't get as Debian packages. Some common stuff like w3m-ssl, links-ssl, and naim. It didn't help that there were many debs on the mirrors that weren't showing up on packages.debian.org such as kernel sources. I'm a little disappointed in that respect.
Hi,
y /i386 /current/
I'm "the friend" who helped him install.. and he used the official daily sarge build from 03/09/04 to be exact..
you too can find the latest daily build at:
http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/dail
please notice that the things AntDude put in his rant are pretty much still a problem..
no graphical install, no graphical fdisk, etc etc..
..thanks for playing tho.
US$0.02++
Grow some new chest hairs and install Debian, the only GREAT distribution!
If you want to get frustrated enough to pull out all of your chest hairs, try installing Gentoo.
After about 6 hours, I have given up on it. The gentoo-cursors package wouldn't install from ANY of the mirrors.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
When building beowulf-style clusters, RedHat kickstart has been one of the quintessential installation tools. Its not the only way do things, but its the one I find most useful in my particular setups.
The lack of a kickstart-like installation automation tool for Debian-based systems has kept my clusters RedHat-based exclusively. Does the new installation tool help with this? If not, why not? I know its been requested many, many times. This functionality is entirely too useful to really ignore.
A use for it that even run-of-the-mill boxes might like is that if your box needs a reinstall, simply reinstall using the kickstart script provided after the original install is complete. The machine will then reinstall in exactly the same manner as before, though you may or may not have to apply updates.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
I have been using Redhat/Fedora for a year now, and I have been using apt for rpm with it. From my past experiences with Debian, I must admit that apt for rpm on Fedora has fewer packages to choose from, and in order to get a good selection, you tend to have to use several package repositories that conflict with eachother... ends up being pretty unstable. ...I am considering making a switch from Fedora to Debian once Sarge is released.
I couldn't see much difference between this installer and the last one anyway. Although the notable difference is there doesn't seem to be any way to do alternate steps this time around.
Still, when I heard "new installer" I was thinking "GUI". Sucks to be disappointed.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
You can make pretend you have a real operating system.
You can even install cdrecord and burn CDs effortlessly.
Works great! No stupid gui to get in your way.
Yeah, but the Gentoo-cursors package wouldn't install ALOT FASTER than other distributions.
Gentoo people, can you back me up on this one? Gentoo is lightning quick from what I hear!
I'm a relatively recent Debian convert, thanks to my friends raving about apt-get mostly. I shied away from Debian for a long time because I could never figure out the installer. It's just about the most user-unfriendly application I've ever used. Almost as if they went out of their way to have everything different than everything else (hint: if 99.9% of apps use the arrow keys and enter to select options in a menu, you may want to do the same. Random keys to choose things do not help the user).
:)
Anyway, after struggling with dselect and whatever else is involved (quite frankly I always got lost about 1/4 of the way in), I discovered Knoppix. It's a non-guru's wet dream, really. Until the day I entered "apt-get upgrade". The next time I booted my machine, squid and apache were both running and were actually listening for connections. My machine tried to load ISDN drivers for some reason, along with something related to braille. I never really spent the time trying to figure out why a metric shitload of new services/modules were being loaded, because unfortunately I needed to use my computer in an unsecured environment. Oh, and I can't remove openoffice anymore either. Apt claims it's not installed, yet it runs fine. *shrug*
Installing software (and removing things other than openoffice) are a dream. Apt-get is godly. Knoppix itself has just the right amount of stuff in it for me, with some interesting extras I never would try if they weren't there. But I'll never again try an entire upgrade
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I thought I was a majority of one on this issue.
I have had the same problem with Debian. After reading post after post about how great the Debian dist was. I could never get X to work either. I tried installing on multiple machines with the same problem on all of them and finally just gave up and went back to SuSE which works fine for me.
I have since installed Red Hat and OpenNA with no problems.
Why exactly - marketing aside - should the installer care about an average luser? People with no clue nor willingness to acquire one are the main source of virtually any computing problem we have, be it security, spam, worms, whatever.
I don't want Joe Idiot being able to install a computer. No matter how you do it - and Debian is quite good in warning users about unsafe settings - Joe will fuck it up and bring another machine that's already as good as compromised online. Thanks a lot, Joe!
Please, care about the clued-in sysadmin. Give Joe the finger. In fact, IMHO the install should fail and tell the user in no uncertain terms that he's too dumb to run this system if he tries something like setting an empty root password.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is the very first time that I have seen someone call Debian a handholding OS.
I tried the new installer yesterday (and Debian for the first time) and was everything but impressed. It very much reminded me of the days I spent with the text base install from RH6.1. The console keyboard settings were wrong (especially annoying with vi) and after installing XFree I had to configure stuff I hadn't touched in years (being a long time RH and now FC user).
Getting Debian on my system was like reliving long lost memories, but not necessarily good ones. Fedora installs so nicely on all of the hardware I tried it so far and I hear that SuSE works like a charm too.
Don't get me wrong though, there are reasons for why I tried Debian and I would very much like the distro to strive and get a modern hardware detection and installation system. Knoppix so far holds the crown in the former IMHO. And before I forget, a stable release with more recent software would also be quite nice ;-).
I feel so sig.
This may be horrible advice, but this is how I always get X to work:
/etc/X11/XF86Config file. When you're done installing the new distro, if X barfs, make a backup of their XF86Config, copy the working file over, and restart X. More than likely, it will work.
First, get any distro that gets X to run properly on your system (Knoppix generally does well). Copy the
Also, if you care about how the config file works, looking at the differences between the two is illuminating.
I know it's silly that you should have to do this, but maybe it will help.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!