New Debian Installer Coming Soon

gnuman99 writes "Debian just released the 4th beta of the new debian-installer, this time for 9 architectures. Some of the improvements include experimental support for the 2.6 kernel, on i386 only. The 2.4 kernel remains the default and recommended kernel for most hardware. Detection of existing operating systems. The following operating systems can be detected and will be added to the boot menu of the installed system: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, GNU Hurd, DOS. Note that by experimental support for 2.6.x kernel simply means that it is experimental in the installer, NOT the actual OS. Debian supported 2.6.x in the Sarge/Sid before 2.6.x was even officially released."

Comments

The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest complaint leveled at debian is how hard it is to install. Having recently installed sarge on both my laptop and desktop I feel qualified to say that the installer is at least on par with any of the commercial distros. Don't sweat the fact that it's still text based - It's still very easy to use. And it works on 9 architectures.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so happy for the 3.0 stable installer, its in text, its easy and it is fast!
I can't understand people that say that Debian is hard to install, my 2nd try and Debian was up and running.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[MrWim]

Sure It's easy to install now but that's only the the beginning of setting up a good linux system, suc as getting GNOME/KDE to your liking and optimising the X server etc. This is debian's disadvantage when it comes to the linux desktop, it tries to be everything to everyone (and this shouldn't change), but the dedicated desktop disros have a clear advantage in this area as they know what they are going to be used for.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Crazy Eight]

I put it to use recently as well and also give it props. It's still text based but more streamlined. If you just want to get to a boot off the disk and a login prompt you don't have to waste a lot of time. IIRC, the design allows for graphical front ends too for those who prefer them, but why miss out on that ncurses TAB TAB ENTER speed and rhythmn? It's just like playing Defender...

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[defective_warthog]

Yes, It's an improvement. But, it didn't setup GRUB correctly on my laptop, I had to manually add the entries for my w2k partition. Also, first time through I used tasksel>Desktop Environment. This loaded KDE and Gnome both of which worked fine except NO terminal would give me a prompt. Xterm, gnome-terminal, kterm, aterm, wterm, rxvt, etc would open and display a flashing cursor. I was not able to enter any commands from any terminal while running X. Third time around I used expert mode, just installed the base system and then used old faithful apt-get to load what I wanted. Still can't get Xfce4 to show up in the gdm session menu.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed Debian about a year ago, and formatting part was horrible. I have nothing against text based fdisk, but why didn't I get any information about partitions when I choosed the mount points??? How can I remember what was the size and filesystem of the /dev/hda8?

Even Redhat 5.2 was much more userfriendly in this aspect. When selecting mount points it presented a nice summary of all partitions including starting and ending cylinder, size and filesystem type.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Liselle]

Oh, this is rich. Here I am, trying to get Debian installed on an old P3-800 machine. I'm about to strangle the installer with my bare hands, so I decide to take a break and see what's on /. this morning. +5 Informative for the article! Since this is a throwaway machine, I will be a guinea pig for them. My day is not entirely shot after all. ;)

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed Sarge from the 4-floppy network installer--you're right, it has come a LONG way. It is much simpler, and joy-of-joys, they have DEPRECIATED dselect! Aptitude is the primary package selector now! Dselect is still there but it's at the bottom of the list, with "EXPERTS ONLY" beside it.

When people badmouth Debian's installer I can only wonder why the same people think Gentoo is so hot. Gentoo isn't even a "distro" since you have to roll everything yourself, step by step. Compared to Gentoo even the old Debian installer was great.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[GuyWithLag]

Funnily, I had this same problem when I recompiled 2.6 without legacy tty support....

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[wilper]

I installed sarge from cdrom the day before yesterday, and there are still a few usability issues to sort out. I ran in circles for five minutes trying to partition the HD, imo the old installer is way easier to use (although not as powerful).

And after the reboot the setup got stuck in an infinite loop when the dhcp failed to provide a good default route (small thing really, but still). An option to _not_ use dhcp would be nice or at least a confirmation that it is ok to use one if it is found.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Calmar]

I recently reinstalled Debian on my workstation PC and had the same problem with Xfce4 not showing up in the gdm session menu. The problem seems to be that the Xfce4 package doesn't create a /etc/dm/Sessions/XFce4.desktop file. My (temporary) solution was to copy the default.desktop to XFce4.desktop and edit it manually to run the xfce4-session executable. I was quite impressed by the installer, it has come a long way since the last time I installed Debian (2002-ish). Still not perfect though, I had some problems with the LVM setup (although probably attributable to user stupidity :-) ).

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[BokLM]

Here I am, trying to get Debian installed on an old P3-800 machine.

Wow, my fastest machine is as fast as your old one :)

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my biggest gripe with the current installer. If it wants to probe for a DHCP server, fine; just fucking ask my permission before using the received settings, please?

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[afd8856]

Is this a troll?

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you can answer a question: The article says "New Debian installer coming soon"... is this soon as most people understand it, or Debian soon... meaning around 2009 with the wind behind them.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[rsheridan6]

So did I. It asked me questions about the refresh rate of my monitor, or some other low-level crap I don't want to have to know about. In terms of ease of use, it's light-years away from Mandrake, which a Downs child could install.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[defective_warthog]

Use the expert mode, there's an option for static IP in that mode.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[cscx]

Two tips about Debian Sarge's installer:

1. Choose expert install. It didn't see my ethernet card otherwise.

2. While it "saw" the ethernet card, you think you could put two and two together and load the module permanently. Not so. Keep a note of the ethernet card's module as you will need to enable it manually later.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[cscx]

Oh yeah, that. That's fucking retarded. One would think you won't need to choose the expert install if you want to choose between DHCP and static IP. That's a pretty 'basic' setting if you ask me. If you are on a static IP network and intend to use FTP to install the packages, you have pretty much shot yourself in the foot. They REALLY need to add an "Advanced" button on the network setup menu... of all the possible assumptions setup can make, this is a bad one.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[FattMattP]

My biggest complaint with the installer is that there's no back button. If you screw up choosing an option you have to reboot and start over from the beginning. Hopefully the new installer will fix that.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[robochan]

So file a bug report/mailing-list post/suggestion/whatever. This is a friggen BETA for pete's sake. It's going to change, probably redically, before its final release.
Whining on slashdot is unlikely to get you anywhere - mention it to the developers.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

"How can I remember what was the size and filesystem of the /dev/hda8?"

Because you wrote it down to a piece of paper (just the same for your hardware so you know which modules you have to load for your network card to be usable)?

Usually it pays using simplest solutions to simplest problems.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

"In terms of ease of use, it's light-years away from Mandrake"

Still, your Mandrake will probably burn your non-digital monitor by testing it. Debian, on the other hand won't do that. And then, being able to answer "is your monitor able to handle multisync?" puts you in exactly the same situation as asking for refresh frequency supported: just go to the monitor datasheet and read it there.

What's exactly the problem with knowing what your hadware is and how does it work?

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[StillAnonymous]

Does it allow installation onto software RAID/LVM partitions yet? That's something that only RedHat and a few other distros currently offer, and it's very useful.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[kabloom]

Surely you reported that in an install report, right?

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Phleg]

Hit escape, or select cancel.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[pangloss]

i don't remember the raid options, but i did install debian onto lvm partitions using beta3. as i recall, the interface for lvm setup could use some work, but i did get it to work in the end.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Slack3r78]

Because it's absolutely ridiculous to have to go to a data sheet to install a freakin display? I'm a huge Linux advocate, 3 of my 4 machines run Linux, I like the way the OS works in general. But needing to tell XFree86 low level monitor specs has always annoyed the hell out of me.

I can generally blaze through the install of most Linux distros, but always end up burning 5-10 minutes looking up the blasted vertical refresh rate and other nonsense for my monitor. There's something wrong here.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[augustwest2112]

Not sure what the expected date is, but I do know that the installer is quite usable in it's current state. I have actually been using it since beta1.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[back_pages]

I found a back button on the Debian installer, that motherfucker.

Fix Debian Installation Mistakes

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

s/DEPRECIATED/DEPRECATED/

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to see Debian's next major step to be a move to a source-based distro like Gentoo. I'd love to see their dependency management expertise be applied to a source distro.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[FattMattP]

Haha. I guess you had a pretty bad Debian experience. :-)

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[AvantLegion]

My biggest complaint with the installer is that there's no back button. If you screw up choosing an option you have to reboot and start over from the beginning.

Debian Say: If you screw up, you no use! You go Mandrake!

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

i am joe six pack, er twelve pack would be more apropos...i have sid running on my i gig thunderbird desktop, woody on my overclocked (whoa, all the way to eleven at 100MhZ)p-75 NAT-firewall box, and can boot xebian on my xbox. i found a bootable debian ISO (i forget if it's sarge or woody)that installs a base system and apt-gets the rest from the net. an effortless debian install is possible if you know your hardware and have a good source list and a remedial knowledge of linux. i rather like the text-ncurses based install, what good is a gui installer? why tie up resources better used for the install. i dunno, may be i'm just an unaccounted demographic skew...

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Short Circuit]

Even faster than mine...my best box is a 750MHz Duron.

I'm still debating between dropping in a 1.4GHz Athlon (Thunderbird core) or buying components for a new box. Probably cheaper and more convenient to upgrade the CPU, since I won't have to change a darn thing in software.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Short Circuit]

In expert mode, is that really a bug?

I mean, I may not want to install modules for all the equipment in my machine when I first install. I may want to install a vender module, or I may be on an embedded system that doesn't have a whole lot of extra room for a fattened kernel.

That's especially true with PCMCIA cards. Better to let card services load the card on insert than have the machine waste time on bootup looking for it when it's not there.

Re:The debian installer is now pretty damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only wonder why the same people think Gentoo is so hot

How do you know it's the same people? Have you been keeping records?

Re:Hmm..

[sinikal]

have you tried "emerge debian-installer"? can't seem to get it to work on mine..

Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with:

tar xvfz package
cd package
configure
make
make install
ldconfig

Are users getting lazy

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

Dependencies my friend, dependencies :-).

Re:Geez

[mattjb0010]

What's wrong with:

tar xvfz package
cd package
configure
make
make install
ldconfig


You forgot the "./" at the front of "./configure", because like any good Unix user you don't have "." in your path. Then it should work for you.

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

right:

wget dependency.tar.gz
tar -vxzf dependency.tar.gz
cd ./dependancy
./configure
make
make install
wget newpackage.tar.gz
tar -vxzf newackage
cd newpackage
./configure
make
make test
make install

Now what is so hard about that. Dependancy tracking package systems create problems whenever you need to install something for which nobody has already made a custom package for your system.

Re:Geez

[CdBee]

well, compared to *click* *click* *go away and make a cup of tea while an entirely preconfigured package installs itself*

quite a lot is wrong with fiddly commandline crap.
Not a troll, not even a Windows-only user, just someone who is fed up of zealots who want to keep us in the dark ages of blinking text prompts and teletype screens

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

gawd... obviously you have never installed a debian package - idiot.

Re:Geez

[Amoeba]

What's wrong with:

tar xvfz package
cd package
configure
make
make install
ldconfig

You forgot the "./" at the front of "./configure", because like any good Unix user you don't have "." in your path. Then it should work for you.

Then again, it appears he is running as root all the time. Must be a Windows convert.

*blink*

Re:Geez

[CdBee]

Never going to if I have to do that, either.
I really get pissed off with you elitist assholes who insist things have to be difficult, as if you prove yourself a real man by installing KDE by manually typing in the source code from a printout.

I use my computer to compute, not to set me daily challenges

Re:Geez

[CdBee]

how ironic, I make two very similar posts in the same sub-thread, one gets modded up as insightful, the other down, as flamebait.

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

What you fail to comprehend is that the precompiled packages may not always be available or that they may not work in the way that you need. Try to find a distro that compiles python scripting support into Vim. Most distros also ship mutt using the ncurses library which often leads to problems when trying to run inside of rxvt. Compiling it with slang support prevents this problem. I also compile in mixmaster support which is not available by default in the distros.

If you ever tried the command line out for a change instead of just discounting it "old" you might find that makes a number of tasks much easier and faster then trying to do them in a gui. Those of us who have some experience with computing choose to use the command line not because we completely disdain the gui but because we understand that it is often the better tool. Spoken language has been advanced for over ten thousand years because it is effective, efficient means of communicating precise information. The same cannot be said about a point and click interface.

It is unfortunate that your ignorance will leave you wasting much of your time fiddling inside of a gui doing what you could have done with a single command at the line. I don't expect that your ignorance is limited to the command line or that you will ever became wise enough to chuck it.

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. If all that you want is a point and click interface then perhaps you should stick to Windows or Mac. You are wasting the best benefits inherent in any Unix clone.

Re:Geez

[CdBee]

"Spoken language has been advanced for over ten thousand years because it is effective, efficient means of communicating precise information. The same cannot be said about a point and click interface."

Firstly, spoken language is only relevant to communication between sentient entities. However when the communication is between a human and a computer, which is easier?

1) Use a long series of commandline switches in a command prompt after navigating it to the location of the files
2) Click on the file and tick the graphical boxes to get the kind of install you like

Commandline switxhes you need to know, and you have to enter them with the right spaces and the right order. A graphical installer can show the available options spacially with details and descriptions, and help files on hand.

Put quite simply, the graphical installer wins for time-saving and efficiency every time.

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Slackware uses a based on a text paradigm. Using that system I can create custom tag file that will allow me to automate custom installs to all of the computers in my networks without having to choose what packages that I want to use on each. I have over a thousand machines under my managment. Deployments are at least 50 to a hundred machines when they happen. I do not have the time to sit selecting options on some graphical installer for each and every one. All that I have to do pop a floppy in each one, let it boot, and then walk away. The text based take everything from that point forward and I can move the floppy to the next machine. Wanna race? You and your graphical installer vs. me and my text one?

FYI, because you do not seem to know what you are talking about, their is no way to select compile time options from a graphical installer based on binary packages.

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like an opinion to me.

Why don't you just fuck off and leave us alone. If you want to use a GUI then that's up to you but I'll never know why GUI zealots such as yourself insist on forcing your opinions on everyone else.

I blame all this on Microsoft. If they made a half decent system to corral all the imbeciles then the UNIX / Linux world would not have to put up with all the moaning from the retarded point and droolers.

Please, go and use a Mac and bother them.

Re:Geez

[cortana]

What you say!? Not all /. posts are moderated by the SAME PERSON!? :)

Re:Geez

[mdpye]

Not a troll, not even a Windows-only user, just someone who is fed up of zealots who want to keep us in the dark ages of blinking text prompts and teletype screens

Ok then, try

emerge --update world

or

apt-get upgrade

There's nothing technically inferior about a command line. Perhaps you were a troll, or perhaps you are just misinformed.

MP

Re:Geez

[WWWWolf]

well, compared to *click* *click* *go away and make a cup of tea while an entirely preconfigured package installs itself*

Are you kidding? It's usually more like *click* *click* *go away for a hour-long coffee break* *find out the installer was interrupted a minute after you left, at 5%, to ask a stupid question*

Re:Geez

[CTachyon]

I used that technique myself. For 3 years. I would install things into neat little /usr/pkg/<packagename> directories, then use a Perl script I wrote that installed the package to /usr using symlinks. However, you forgot some stuff...

wget http://some.random.server/~foouser/some/inane/depe ndency.tar.gz
wget http://another.random.server.in.cn/with/1k/downloa dspeed.tar.gz
lynx http://www.google.com/search\?q=where+the+hell+is+ THAT+at\?
http://somewhere.you.would.never.guess/ THAT.tar.Z
tar vxzf dependency.tar.gz
cd dependency-1.0.0
...
uncompress -c THAT.tar.Z | tar vxf -
^C
uncompress -c THAT.tar.Z | tar tf - | xargs rm -fv
mkdir THAT
cd THAT
uncompress -c ../THAT.tar.Z | tar vxf -
ls -l
vim Makefile
vim wrong-makefile-fragment.mak
vim some/arcane/config/dir/fragment.mak
vim README
lynx obscure/path/to/documentation.html
vim path/you/would/never/guess/unintuitive.h

Once upon a time, my computer ran Slackware, but I can't say that with a straight face anymore. I don't even remember which version. Half my C++ programs don't work quite right anymore, inbetween the C++ compiler (dragged kicking and screaming from egcs-2.91) and the C library (I *think* glibc-2.0ish) getting upgraded to modern times. I won't even touch on multimedia dependencies.

Needless to say, as soon as I get a test box to copy everything over to, the server is getting Debian and apt-get shoved up its disk.

Re:Geez

[Crazy Eight]

...like any good Unix user you don't have "." in your path.

I feel certain that I've heard this injunction before, but now that I'm actually thinking about it I've got to wonder. Why not?

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

well, if you had, you would know that installing packages under debian is less work than under windows and the first poster was JOKING!

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

where do you get make from?

This isn't about the package system, it's about the installer.

Re:Geez

[BoysDontCry]

For security reasons. For example, someone could put a file called "ls" in the /tmp directory that creates a shell and makes is setuid root. Then they just wait for root to cd /tmp and ls, and they've got root.

Re:Geez

[Nothinman]

It's not like making a custom package or getting the source to the original and patching it up to current is terribly difficult.

Re:Geez

[samhalliday]

LOL... you just described my life as an LFS user; thank god i upgraded to debian... I HAVE MY LIFE BACK!!! (after i `apt-get update` just one more time today...)

Re:Geez

[NoOneInParticular]

Funny guy. Come back when you programmed your GUI program using a GUI. Face it, for complex stuff, nothing beats a (programming) language.

Re:Geez

[Anonymous Coward]

Commandline switxhes you need to know, and you have to enter them with the right spaces and the right order. A graphical installer can show the available options spacially with details and descriptions, and help files on hand.

Put quite simply, the graphical installer wins for time-saving and efficiency every time.

No it doesn't. In the case where one already knows the command-line options, it's common for it to be much faster to use the command-line.

For example, when I want to open a particular directory on my hard disk in a graphical file manager, I usually find it much faster to open a terminal and type a command line than to open the file manager in its default start location and navigate by clicking on icons. Likewise when I want to edit a file, I usually find it much faster to type a command identifying the editor, options, and file in question, than to open a file manager, navigate to the file, and drag its icon onto an editor's icon (or to open an editor, click on the "File" menu, click on "Open", and navigate to the file in question).

debian's response

[dncsky1530]

to new version's of redhat SE that are gaining attention in the business world

Re:debian's response

[krmt]

Actually, this project has been in the works for years, well before Redhat even announced that they were ending their free distro.

The primary motivation for the new installer was that the old one had a horrific codebase that no one wanted to touch. It was a major sticking point for the last release as to whether or not the focus should be on the new installer (then very much in its infancy) or "just" polishing up the old one and shoving it out the door. The latter choice was made, and it turned out not to be worthwhile.

This new installer is much nicer under the hood, in that it's made up of individual components that can be swapped in and out relatively easily. Once recent example of this is a few months ago the installer switched from the old partconf partitioner to the newer partman that you see in it now. This was a very easy and smooth transition, thanks to the way the new installer is structured.

The other advantage to the new installer was that it was a good chance to implement things that the users were asking for, including hardware autodetection, aptitude instead of dselect, grub over lilo, wifi autodetection, less questions, etc. There's still lots of requests that have to be filled in. pppoe support is only in its infancy, 2.6 needs a lot more testing, the documentation needs a lot of work, and some multilanguage issues need to be solved before a gtk interface can be slapped on. Those are only a few of the holes that I personally see, I'm sure that other people on the team can bring up others. Ultimately though, I know the core members of this team and I can definitely say that they're not concerned with Redhat at all. They, and I, simply want to build the best installer possible for Debian so that we can not only release sarge soon, but also prevent the installer from being a reason for holding up future releases. We're crafting this one for our own future.

Knoppix

[hak1du]

Actually, there is an excellent Debian installer out, and it's been out for a while. It's called Knoppix. You can test compatibility at the store by booting into it, get a live preview of everything, and install a complete system with a recent set of packages with one command. While it uses KDE by default, it's easy to switch to Gnome.

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like all those "smart" installers, i like to know what there are installed on my system, knoppix add too many programs.

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

Knoppix, as with other installers such as Progeny's PGI and Redhat's Anaconda fail to meet Debian's strict standards. The installer must operate on all of Debian's supported architectures.

If i386 with a CD drive is what you've got then Knoppix is for you. But don't ever think that it can be the installer for Debian. It just isn't up for the challenge.

Re:Knoppix

[djupdal]

Except it does not install a clean version of debian (stable, testing or unstable). I have seen someone doing a knoppix hd install only to get lots of package dependency problems because (I think) some important packages are not standard debian packages. Better use some time on the real debian installer.

Re:Knoppix

[anarxia]

The problem with Knoppix is that it doesnt fit the "Universal Operating System" style of Debian.

I installed Debian (with the beta3 installer) on a box for file serving/backup. Very few packages (5 or 6) in the default install were unnecessary and I only needed to: apt-get nfs-kernel server.

With Knoppix it would take me a lot of time just to uninstall packages I wouldn't use. Knoppix is great for desktops but it's not the best for everyone.

Re:Knoppix

[cortana]

But since it's Debian, you can just apt-get remove whatever you don't like. Or run aptitude, and interactively pick packages to remove.

Re:Knoppix

[hak1du]

I have seen someone doing a knoppix hd install only to get lots of package dependency problems because (I think) some important packages are not standard debian packages. Better use some time on the real debian installer.

I have not seen any serious problems. There are some small differences, but they don't seem to hurt anything, at least not after dist-upgrading the machine. Overall, Knoppix-based installs have been much less work than "real" Debian installs in my experience, and that's ultimately what counts.

Re:Knoppix

[lrhegeba]

some of the important base packages are knoppix-version, but these are not really far from the usual debian version. analogous to self-created packages from deb-src you can update these very easily to the standard debian versions. i have done this here on 2 machines with rather new hardware where the debian-installer wasn't really working; called knoppix hdinstall and then apt-get update from there on.
knoppix's hardware detection is just so much better and very mature, i wished the debian people would select the best tool for the installation job and accept different installers for different architectures. at least i can see no good in giving >90% of users a harder time

Re:Knoppix

[Elektroschock]

And what objections are against SuSes YAST?

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

And what objections are against SuSes YAST?

It's only very recently been released under a Free locense so I doubt it was available when most of the decisions were being made.

However, to be clear on this, are you asserting that YAST does work on all the platforms that Debian supports?

Re:Knoppix

[luwain]

I used Knoppix to install Debian and it was so easy compared to the installation of ANY operating system that it makes up for any drawbacks installing this way may have. First of all, you can run Knoppix first, and know that all of your hardware works, your internet works, and the applications work before installing. So you know exactly what you're going to get when you do install. The install takes less than 20 minutes!

I haven't experienced many package dependency problems, but even if I had, the strength of Debian is it's package managing system, so it's rather easy to resolve dependencies.

Also, after installing Knoppix, I can just use my Debian CDs to install any of the 8710 packages that I want.

Debian is now one of my favorite distros. I would have never bothered with it (why suffer through an excruciating install, when there are solid distros that are easy to install) if I couldn't get up and running so easily.

I've converted more people to Linux using Knoppix, than with any other distro. And usually, after they've been hooked using the live CD, they do the hard disk install and they end up upgrading to the latest version of Debian, or continue using Knoppix the way it is.

There's probably a live CD distro out by now that does install a "clean" install of Debian. It probably is trivial to create one. Also,the biggest problem I usually have when installing a new OS is hardware detection. Knoppix probably has the best hardware detection of any distro, and certainly does a better job of it than the Debian installers.

Re:Knoppix

[Telex4]

Knoppix is great, until you start updating packages. It's not a normal clean Debian install, so you get all kinds of crazy dependency hell, with packages suddenly becoming horribly broken.

Add to that the time you have to spend after transferring Knoppix to disc cleaning it up, removing unwanted packages, installing needed packages, fixing configuration problems (especially, in my experience, with languages and gettext in the command line), and it's not worth it, given that it only takes an hour or so of time actually sitting at the keyboard to get a fully functional Debian system.

About 3 months after I did a Knoppix install on my parents' machine, I had to wipe it and do a from-scratch Debian install, because an apt-get update destroyed the init system.

Re:Knoppix

[/dev/trash]

Plus it's not super duper really really Free

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

"but they don't seem to hurt anything, at least not after dist-upgrading the machine"

You mean you didn't carefully look at it, and then you didn't see where the problems were, don't you?

If you have a Knoppix, just do something like `apt-cache search knoppix` just to see how many packages have been tunned for Knoppix. Once you change your /etc/apt/sources.list to any "official" Debian release (stable, testing or unstable) do you really think any of those packages are going to be upgraded on a dist-upgrade? Do you really think anyone of them is going to be deleted due to an asked dependency (pointing to "real" Debian) on an upgrade? What do you think will happen when both foo and foo-knoppix are installed in the same machine? If you stick with Stable, what do you think will happen for security updates to ssh-knoppix?

"Knoppix-based installs have been much less work than "real" Debian installs in my experience, and that's ultimately what counts."

Yes... if you are so shortsigthed as no to see what will happen tomorrow!

Re:Knoppix

[drfreak]

It may have been that way at one time, but Knoppix is perfectly installable as Debian. If you use a package manager such as dselect or synaptic to perform a package upgrade after install, it will resolve the sysvinit problem and remove the Knoppix-specific version.

Re:Knoppix

[Tarantolato]

While it uses KDE by default, it's easy to switch to Gnome.

When I tried this (at a time when I admittedly knew much less about Linux) I found this not to be the case. Is there a Knoppix->Gnome faq out there?

Re:Knoppix

[Doug Neal]

Good point. I quite like to install debian from knoppix by creating the partitions and filesystems manually and then running deboostrap on it, compiling a custom kernel, essentially LFS but with debian packages instead. And you get a proper clean debian system out of it :)

Re:Knoppix

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, knoppix's hardware detection is marvellous. Still, I would not use knoppix to install a debian system on my computer anymore. I did that once and after some time ran into more and more problems (mostly dependency problems). All caused by the fact that knoppix is a wild mixture of stable, unstable, testing, experimental, and packages put together by Klaus Knopper, the founder of knoppix.

A possible solution to this mess may be Kanotix, which is said to be a lot more useable for a HD-install. I have not checked it out yet, though.

Wolf

Re:Knoppix

[KermitJunior]

In that case, try Morphix. You can simply choose which modules you want to install.

Cleaner install than KNoppix too...more debianish.

KJ

Re:Knoppix

[llefler]

About 3 months after I did a Knoppix install on my parents' machine, I had to wipe it and do a from-scratch Debian install, because an apt-get update destroyed the init system.

Not to be picky, but I think you mean apt-get upgrade. Update just pulls down the lists of available software, it doesn't install/remove anything. Oddly enough, I've had the best luck setting apt to 'unstable'. (for the first time ever, I'm actually running the latest release of KDE, not the one installed with a distro) And to be honest, if you can do a 'from-scratch Debian install', you should have been able to fix an apt-get problem.

Re:Knoppix

[llefler]

Is there a Knoppix->Gnome faq out there?

You might try Gnoppix.

Re:Knoppix

[Tarantolato]

Ah. I thought it'd gone dead. Thanks.

great!

[Anonymous Coward]

it's good to see my state of the art hardware will be detected along with my DOS and hurd installations... now if only we can get nvidia to release drivers for DOS and the hurd, my audigy and RAID setup... those old DOS games without the speed limiters will trully fly on a 3gighz pentium... they'll have to put epilepsy warnings on them though...

On a side note, can anyone tell me why debian is still i386 compiled rather than i586? I heard one argument saying that although it was i386 they were optimized internally for the higher processors. Not trolling deb, just interested. Can any gurus give us a definitive answer?

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'd like to see an i686 compiled version.

Most of the recent binary distros are i686 compiled. Not a huge speed difference but it does appear to make the system a little more snappy.

(currently running the i386 Debian)

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably compiled with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686.
This means you could still run it on 386, but it's optimized for PII, K6 and PIII.

Re:great!

[Amoeba]

On a side note, can anyone tell me why debian is still i386 compiled rather than i586? I heard one argument saying that although it was i386 they were optimized internally for the higher processors. Not trolling deb, just interested. Can any gurus give us a definitive answer?

Because it's not only the software packages that are 2 years behind in the stable release, it's the hardware too!

(This was meant to be funny ha-ha... but dammit it might even be true. *sigh* If I could come up with a funny pun about "definitive answer" and the number differences I'd be rolling in karma. Some days I don't know why I even bother to ever post.)

Re:great!

[frickenhell]

Take a look at apt-build Build your packages for specific arch.

Re:great!

[Crazy Eight]

I'm not a guru, but I am pretty sure that i586 optimized code runs slower (or even poorly) on anything that isn't a 586. The whole foo-i586.rpm thing was a kind of marketing gimmick of Mandrake's back when they were packaging pgc and the K6-3 was considered a fast processor. The notion of "optimizing" builds like that has been brought up on the Debian mailing lists before but dismissed as being not worth the effort. After all, Debian has a huge amount of software to keep in the repository. If one starts subdividing x86 where does one stop? Should one offer libpng3 compiled for i386, i486, i586, i686, K7, and P4? Pragmatically, it isn't worth it. They might not even package 64-bit binaries for quite some time.

The biggest optimizations to be had are already packaged in the kernels to begin with, though there's probably something to be said for tuning up glibc too (IIRC Redhat does this).

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

one day... in the future... people will understand there is little speed inprovement compiling for modern architecture.
Most day-today programs you use don't use any of the advanced features (MMX, 3DNOW, ...) of the newer processors.
sendmail, apache, cron, ssh, gaim, ... and many other apps you use often don't use these new instructions. Well, they don't even use the FPU actually for most of them.
Of course, it might be a different story for apps like GIMP, mplayer, maybe some window managers, ... and games (even if there are very few on Linux).
The problem is that even if the apps might benefit from these new instructions sets, gcc don't produce code very optimized imho.

I think some Gentoo (all optimizations possible) vs Debian (i386 compiled) benchmarks posted some time ago on Slashdot showed the speed improvement was very minor for Gentoo over debian.

-Kamal

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

On a side note, can anyone tell me why debian is still i386 compiled rather than i586? I heard one argument saying that although it was i386 they were optimized internally for the higher processors. Not trolling deb, just interested. Can any gurus give us a definitive answer?

Yeah, you are trolling. But I'll bite. Even Slashdit has run stories pointing out that compiling optimised for anything other than i386 is a waste of time.

Basically there are only two things where compiling optimised code _might_ help you on a day to day basis.

1. The Kernel

Debian already provides specific kernels optimised for specific CPUs.

2. The C Library

Since almost every program makes use of, at some point, the C library - optimisations there have a system-wide impact. Debian provides a C library which will detect optimised versions of itself and make use of them if available.

The only other case where optimisation is useful is for things using the FPU/SSE/MMX/etc. Those things don't even run on i386, so the point is moot.

Re:great!

[WWWWolf]

those old DOS games without the speed limiters will trully fly on a 3gighz pentium...

On a 486 and higher, an unpatched DOS Ultima II crashes on startup with message "Division by zero" due to a speed calibration problem.

I haven't tried, but on a 3 gigahertz Pentium, it'll probably die with "Division by some less-zero-than-zero number that the mathematicians don't have a concept for" error.

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

For compatibility reasons. Sigh. Nobody seems to understand this concept! The reason the installer is still text-based, the reason the new installer took so long to make, the reason it's still based on the 2.4 kernel, the reason it doesn't use the most aggressive optimization flags, is because Debian runs on _so many architectures_. I personally find that quite useful.

Re:great!

[zarr]

On a 486 and higher, an unpatched DOS Ultima II crashes on startup with message "Division by zero" due to a speed calibration problem.

This sounds like a variant of the famous Turbo Pascal 7 "Runtime error 200" bug. There was similar bugs in earlier Turbo Pascal releases also.

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian does have an optimized libc w/ NPTL in the libc-i686 package in unstable

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's probably compiled with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686."

No, it isn't. You just can run it on i686 class or higher computers.

Re:great!

[Daniel]

There is discussion from time to time about optimizing for a more recent version of the x86 processors. So far no-one has presented convincing (ie, non-anecdotal; not subject to placebo effects) evidence that this actually makes things significantly faster for most packages. In addition, the more optimizations you do for one particular CPU variant, the more likelihood that you actually make things slower on others. For instance, targetting i586 is a terrible idea (according to common wisdom, anyway) because it actually decreases the performance of code on more recent x86 processors.

Some packages that do see significant benefit (for instance, OpenSSL, libc, the kernel) are already compiled for all x86 variants.

Daniel

The biggest problem

[Anonymous Coward]

with Debian is that the people who use it are way too nice. Brrr, that kind of thing just gives me the creeps.

Re:The biggest problem

[Anonymous Coward]

So true in my experience as well. Spooky! yet interesting observation.

Re:The biggest problem

[agwis]

heh...you obviously have never asked a simple config question in #debian!

All kidding a side, I'd generally agree with that statement myself. I've met a few debian users who were very friendly and helpful, but there also are a few too many who act like they are l33t debian users and love to hit that 'RTFM' button.

Out of curiousity, what are you insuating? Are slackware|red hat|suse|etc less friendly than debian users? Are we possibly on to something here? Maybe it's because debian users love playing and sharing with their woody (version) :P

Re:The biggest problem

[Hrothgar The Great]

Don't meet me then. I use it and I tend to be more "drunken asshole" than nice.

Re:The biggest problem

[MysticalMatt517]

When I was new to Linux I ultimately chose Debian because the users I talked to didn't treat me like a total idiot for asking questions. When your a brand new user, sometimes "go google it" or "rtfm" is easier said than done. Often times you don't understand what your looking at so selecting the right google keywords to find your answer is a lot like hitting the lottery, and then you may not understand that your looking at the answer after you've found it. The Debian people I found didn't hold my hand, but they also took 20 seconds extra to point me in the right direction and give me enough information to tell me what I was looking at.

9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the Debian installer working on nine different architectures is interesting, but it has a glaring flaw: It requires nine separate binaries, one for each architecture. That means making a big pile of bootable CDs to install on various platforms. Boo!

Although it is admittedly difficult, it is in fact possible to write a single piece of bootstrapping machine code that properly runs on ALL of those architectures, without faulting, that jumps to a separate section of the executable code based on the architecture it detects. (This is similar to the old eicar file which was both a text file and an x86 executable, only this is all of a PowerPC, Alpha, x86, 68xxx, etc., executable.)

This means that a SINGLE binary installer can work on ALL nine architectures; a tremendous improvement. Yes, Debian has taken a step in the right direction with their nine platforms, but they need to work on getting the binary compatibility nailed down.

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, the nine different binaries are available here...

• alpha net installer
• arm net installer
• hppa net installer
• ia64 net installer
• i386 net installer
• m68k net installer
• mipsel net installer
• powerpc net installer
• sparc net installer

I'll give you $5 to consolidate those into one. You have six hours. :-)

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is technically impressive and desirable to get things to work on as many architectures as possible. I don't think it is too much of a compromise of morals to offer different isos with better installers rather than a sub-par one across all.

I have seen some screen shots of the new installer and it will go a long way towards debian adoption in my mind. As cool as gentoo is, it is just not practical for anyone but an enthusiast (of the performance or gnu type) - a community based all-GPL distro needs to be there with reasonable ease of use, just incase the community gets hijacked by corps and a load of binary drivers.

no this is not a troll (re: gentoo vs debian), but there are different reasons for each to exist and it's best if they BOTH exist for their various niches. I am just saying, debian can forfill it's niche BETTER if it prizes easy of use a little more, whilst still staying true to it's foundations.

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[sholden]

Since the binaries on the CD are architecture specific what does it matter if the boot system it too?

Do you really want to be able to boot the x86 binary CD on Solaris? How would that help achieve anything? Other than making the boot system completely unintelligible to everyone.

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[sholden]

s/Solaris/sparc/

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the CD could include just three binaries: (1) the universal boot system and, for each platform, (2) bzip2 and (3) a compiler. Then rather than a CD filled with binaries, it would include (compressed) source code for everything else. It could then compile the entire operating system for scratch for that platform during the install.

Just an idea. It'd probably be pretty slow, although hardware is getting faster these days. Actually, isn't there a Linux install that does this? I can't remember what it's called. Gentoo?

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

s/for scratch/from scratch/

:-)

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[kasperd]

I can't remember what it's called. Gentoo?

Yes, Gentoo is one of them. But there are others Source Mage for example. But a bootable self contained system is more than just bzip2 and a compiler. You need, kernel, libraries, a shell, various command line utils, make, binutils, linker, compiler, etc. When it is all there we are talking about multiple MB. Do you really want to have to download nine copies of this when you only need one of them?

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Although it is admittedly difficult, it is in fact possible to write a single piece of bootstrapping machine code that properly runs on ALL of those architectures, without faulting, that jumps to a separate section of the executable code based on the architecture it detects.

Llinking to Google's definition of possible doesn't exactly back your silly claim, although it fools lazy mods. Also, having a text file with a ".com" extension doesn't make it executable.

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess it depends how far you want to roll back the source idea--you could include the source code to the kernel, the libraries, the shell, make, etc., and compile those with a monolithic compiler to get bootstrapped. You know, use a compiler that's something smaller, more like tcc rather than gcc. (I know tcc is only x86, but just as an example.)

Or perhaps all of those tools could be included as binaries, but not platform-specific. Rather, they could all be compiled to a simple virtual machine, and the bootstrap code just be a virtual machine emulator? Then the first thing it would do after booting its virtual machine would be compile native versions of all of those things, and use them from that point forward. That'd be kind of cool.

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the text file is:

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIR US-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

It is in fact a perfectly valid .COM file, very carefully constructed (although not with the extra space that Slashdot will add--download it directly here instead). If you rename it to a .COM file and run it, it prints the obvious message.

The Google definition link is awesome though. :-)

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[trashme]

After reading your post and following your links, I have come to the conclusion that you are talking nonsense. The google link is to the definition of the word possible and the eicar link is to some sort of file for testing antivirus programs. No proof that your claim is in any way possible.

How can you write a single piece of code that runs on different architectures with different instruction sets? i386 machine code will look like garbage to a PPC machine. Please mod the parent down, it's just rubbish.

Re:9 Architectures, 9 Binaries

[fmaresca]

Although it is admittedly difficult, it is in fact possible to write a single piece of bootstrapping machine code that properly runs on ALL of those architectures, without faulting, that jumps to a separate section of the executable code based on the architecture it detects.

Ah, yes. We have here in La Plata, Argentina a compiler wich makes binaries in a way that they can be loaded and executed in every machine, so we don't need to worry about big.endian vs. little-endian and stupid architecture-dependant things like that.
We can ever make this bins run on little hardware as ZX Spectrums.

Come on, you are out of your mind.

good news

[Marsala]

I used the new installer when I moved to Debian testing on my new workstation a few months ago. There were a couple of rough spots, but nothing a little command line prodding and correcting couldn't get around.

The installer does a nice job of addressing the long-standing issues most people have had with the installer (namely, having to deal with dselect and the 4 trillion packages Debian has :), and breaks the install down into nice, manageable chunks.

Now... if there's a way to script installs (and I believe there is, but haven't checked it out yet) like RH's kickstart so I deploy a couple hundred servers in the datacenter (yes, I know about FAI... doesn't compare to RH's kickstart), I'd be on easy street. :)

Nice work, guys.

X11

[bcmm]

Would it have better autodetection of XF86Config values? I have always had great difficulty running X in Debian.

Re:X11

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get install discover mdetect read-edid
will detect mouse, graphic card and monitor.

Re:X11

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried the installer, but I do know tha in Sarge the file XF86Config-4 is automatically created by debconf. In other words you can use dkpg-reconfigure to change the settings of XFree86. I don't know if the installer provide autodetection, but still I loudly celebrate the fact that debconf makes everything a lot easier.

Hmm.. I did not answer you question did I? :)

Re:X11

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea cause THAT'S real intuitive...

Seriously, every time I read I post where someone say you just need to .... then .... then .... I just roll my eyes. How exactly are they supposed to know that?

If those packages really can do what your saying reliably and better then the default installer then the new beta Debian IS broken. You shouldn't have to know voodoo just to solve basic issues that the majority of other distros solved long ago. When Sarge finally releases in 2005 the only people who are going to think the new installer is any good are people who knew how bad the old version was.

Re:X11

[krmt]

Yes, the new installer will autodetect and select the right values for your X config. We've had a lot of successful reports about it so far, although more testing would definitely be a good thing.

Re:X11

[Anonymous Coward]

The installer installs those packages for you in the process of installing XFree86 now. The XFree86 package itself configures XFree86, not the installer (the way it should be; you can always reconfigure and the discover package can do a lot of auto-reconfiguring to make that unimportant). (One of those packages is IA-32 only, I think; so that's an exception sometimes.)

Tried installing Debian once

[mindaktiviti]

I tried installing debian once, here were my impressions:

- X & video driver didn't install properly (but I fixed it).
- USB scrolling mouse (logitech) didn't install properly (but I fixed it as well).
- I couldn't get the sound card to work.
- I couldn't get the network card to work (this one sucked because I had to keep switching back and forth in order to get suggestions and then to try them).
- The people on irc.debian.org were very friendly and helpful.

It was the first time trying linux (about a year and a half ago), and I haven't tried it again, however I'm waiting for a slightly nicer installer. Maybe I'll try it now (It's Sunday, nothing else to do).

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[Uerige]

Yeah when networking don't work that really really sucks hard, because all the information you need may be available freely on the internet, you can't get it. I remember when I didn't get ISDN to work, it was weeks of switching between linux and windows, always the search->download->reboot->install->fail->reboot cycle. It made me all nuts. I surrendered at the end, only to discover (a year later) that you need network card suppord enabled in the kernel config (how come there's not a single sentence mentioning this in the online help?)!

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[BiggerIsBetter]

I've installed Debian many times (it was my first distro - but not my current one), and my pet peeve is the glaring lack of software raid support. Pretty much every other installer can set up, partition and install onto software RAID (md device) - but Debian can't.

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[kasperd]

X & video driver didn't install properly (but I fixed it).
That also happened to me when I installed RH6.0 for the first time.

USB scrolling mouse (logitech) didn't install properly (but I fixed it as well).
Interesting with Red Hat Linux 9 and Fedora Core 1 it has worked out of the box under X. But unfortunately it is completely broken under gpm. And by completely broken I mean it was so bad, that it would have been better if it had not worked at all. I have never heard about anybody who got it working.

I couldn't get the sound card to work.
I have tried that as well. My first kernel hack ever was to get ALS120 working under Linux.

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[nadaou]

Installing Debian via Knoppix should solve most of those problems.

Debian isn't really the most newbie-friendly distribution. It's really by, of, and for linux developers and professionals (which is why once you get your head around the way things are done, bolts of sunlight start to shine out of every ventilation hole of your Debian box, and life is good). You might have a much more satisfying experience at first by installing say Lycoris instead (Debian back-end with user-friendly front-end).

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[mindaktiviti]

One of the main reasons I went with debian for my first try was because I wanted to learn from a neutral distribution. The plan was to stick with it and use it for programming. Heh heh, I guess that plan backfired, but no time like the present to try again! :)

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[Anonymous Coward]

The network thing is one of my pet peeves. I have no idea how to install the newest version of Debian stable using a gigabit card without a lot of pain. If they would just update the 2.4 kernel to the latest version instead of using 2.4.18 for the installation it wouldn't be a problem.

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[mbanck]

It was the first time trying linux (about a year and a half ago),

So that means you are not talking about the new debian-installer but rather about the old boot-floppies. Everybody knows that they suck.

Michael

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[Chandon Seldon]

I had no trouble making this happen a couple years ago. It should still work now.

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[Anonymous Coward]

Knoppix for newbies. Seriously.

Mandrake gave me headaches, knoppix gave me much love and super cow powers.

Re:Tried installing Debian once

[BiggerIsBetter]

You would think so, but not with the Woody installer, and not with the development installer. Perhaps it was my particular combination, but either way, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE all had no problems with it.

What about *BSD?

[Homology]

The following operating systems can be detected and will be added to the boot menu of the installed system: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, GNU Hurd, DOS.

They add detection for GNU Hurd, but not OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Funny, really.

Re:What about *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

They add detection for GNU Hurd, but not OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Funny, really.

Oh, that's because BSD is dy....nahhh too easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Re:What about *BSD?

[diegocgteleline.es]

are you offering? 8) AFAIK this is *NOT* a final release and they haven't said "WE'RE NOT SUPPORTING BSD"

Re:What about *BSD?

[Turmio]

If they didn't find it worth to implement but you do, then go ahead and do it. It's free software after all.

Re:What about *BSD?

[niittyniemi]

> They add detection for GNU Hurd, but not OpenBSD, FreeBSD and
> NetBSD. Funny, really.

Not funny but sad.

Although I suppose they can't really add an installer for
"real" FreeBSD and "real" NetBSD when Debian developers are
working on GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/NetBSD
even if they both have the same amount of users as GNU/Hurd
....about 3 at the last count....although to be fair I wasn't counting RMS :)

Re:What about *BSD?

[bkhl]

Not so strange, considering the differences in how BSD handles partitions.

Re:What about *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to. People who use BSD never need to boot into anything else =P

Re:What about *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to. People who use BSD never need to boot into anything else =P

Are you implying that BSD will boot once... and then...will never boot again? It's true...it's true... BSD IS DEAD!

Re:What about *BSD?

[mbanck]

They add detection for GNU Hurd, but not OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD.

That's probably because Joey Hess managed to run a Debian GNU/Hurd image via Bochs. See his journals entries here and his installation report here.

Feel free to add support for BSD yourself, Joey is in no way a Hurd guy, he just did happen to have a BSD installation around or does not care.

Michael

Re:What about *BSD?

[mbanck]

he just did happen to have a BSD

s/did/did not/

Michael

Re:What about *BSD?

[Homology]

Not so strange, considering the differences in how BSD handles partitions.

You don't need to know the *BSD internal filesystems (which BSD calls partitions) to boot it on i386. If you are using GRUB, you boot *BSD the same way as you boot Windows : by chainloading using a specified partition (which BSD calls a slice).

That's all. I've done multi-boot setups several times using GRUB installed on a Linux distribution.

Re:Hmm..

[mattjb0010]

have you tried "emerge debian-installer"? can't seem to get it to work on mine..

Keep waiting...

Hard part?

[NickeB]

Would anyone mind enlightening someone who hasn't ever used debian? What was the tricky part with the old installer?
Gentoo doesn't really even have a real installer and most people appear to be fine with it.
Slackware and FreeBSD have pretty straightforward installers, but they're not really difficult...

Re:Hard part?

[Uerige]

Never got that. The old debian installer is already so easy to use: Insert cd, (press enter, repeat), done.

Re:Hard part?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, these were my problems with Woody:

1. The installer I used (2.4-Reiser) didn't absorb keystrokes properly, so when you hit ENTER for one menu, it also accepted the default setting for the NEXT screen before you get a chance to see what it said. Needless to say I was disgusted, having solved this 20 years ago as a kid learning BASIC. However, no-one else seems to have noticed this problem, so it only seems to affect me.

2. DSELECT. It will make you cry, literally. In the pleasant days of DOS, a text-mode utility could be a pretty and intuitive thing, e.g. with an interface like Turbo C or RHIDE. The Debian people missed the 1990s and wrote this ugly, unfriendly and generally depressing thing instead. And you have to use it in order to get something usable, like Synaptic (which runs in X).

3. It didn't detect the Radeon 7500 correctly. This was a bit cutting-edge, I guess, but when I installed the stock driver set that I used in Mandrake 8.1, it hard-locked and I had to re-install the whole damn thing to fix it.

4. I could not find out how to check that DEB files were intact and not corrupted.

5. You have to move mountains to install a DEB file without using APT. Unlike RPMs which you can download at work and bring home, DEB files seem to need a whole load of other crap or they won't install.

6. If you use the APT update thing, it decides it wants to download 60MB of updates, or more. This was not good on a dialup link being charged per-minute, so I deferred the update. When I needed to install some other packages from the CD, it treacherously REFUSED to install them from the disk in my hand until it had downloaded the 60MB of updates at tremendous cost!

7. It wouldn't accept my custom inputrc file and
ignored it.

So I struggled for a while, gave up and used Gentoo instead. That wasn't great but had the virtue of actually working :-(

Re:Hard part?

[BiggerIsBetter]

The installer is pretty simple - if you know what you want. The other distros (Knoppix, Mandrake, SuSE, etc) make some assumptions based on hardware found and typical usage and set much of the system up for you, but Debian doesn't. Eg, many people won't know which modules they want to load, things like the parport module - obvious if you know, but the installer should detect a parallel port and decide to load it automagically. Imagine a new user doing that, and then hitting #linux with questions about why his printer doesn't work. That's probably the kind of thing that makes it hard for new users, especially users who haven't had much Linux experience.

Re:Hard part?

[zonix]

What was the tricky part with the old installer?

Numerous posts here on /. suggest that it's the missing hardware autodetection and lack of a graphical installer.

You need to insert some kernel modules manually during install (for NIC, sound, etc.), which means you'd have to know what hardware you're running. Familiarity with the Linux kernel's 'make menuconfig' module selection is an advantage here too because the selections in the Debian installer are the same (ie. same groupings). The new installer detects hardware automatically, which is fine if it works - I've tried it twice, so far no problems.

The point about the graphical installer is really non-essential, unless you can't navigate with a keyboard. The new installer is reworked and more modular as stated on the "About the Debian Installer" page, and as such it's should be easy to put a graphical installer ontop of it. Should make some people happy.

I've always loved the Debian Installer! For me it was a more hands-on experience, and with the ability to select kernel modules during the install, I was able to make my old parallel port CD-burner work correctly without a fuss. But that's just me. One cool thing about the Debian installer is the fact that you can follow the standard sequential set of dialogs during the install process, like any other installer, but you can also get a list of all the tasks and jump to anyone on the fly, at any stage during the install. This is helpful if you suddenly find out that you mistyped your IP-address or forgot to create a partion, things like that. Both the old and the new installer support this.

z

Re:Hard part?

[NickeB]

Numerous posts here on /. suggest that it's the missing hardware autodetection and lack of a graphical installer.
Aye, though not at the moment the question was posted.

Clears it all up though, thanks.

Re:Hard part?

[zonix]

DSELECT. It will make you cry, literally.

It sure will!

My advice is always to skip dselect and just stick with tasksel during the install to select what you need like "X Window System", "C/C++ Development", "GNOME Window Manager", "Web Server", etc. After you're done with tasksel just agt-get what you need. You can search the package repository with apt-cache search.

You would never want not to use APT! It handles dependencies and distribution upgrades excellently! I guess having the cd-rom included in your sources.list should have worked in your case, though a haven't had the need for this myself, so I can't really comment on what could go wrong.

z

Re:Hard part?

[just-a-stone]

i'm used to the old installer and i learned to stop worrying and love ncurses frontends. despite of some naming conventions, i can't see much difference between freebsd, solaris and old debian installers.

ad knoppix:
once, i tried to do a knoppix auto-install (make own knoppix cd that installs itself on boot, starts networking (dhcp) and runs sshd for easier server installation (i forgot the special supersonic ibm kvm cable and was too curious about the new toy...) - it was unlikely to work, but in the end, there only was one single annoying point: knoppix didn't install the initrd image it uses itself from cd.

if a system runs from a knoppix cd, this does not mean, that it still runs after a knoppix-install, espacially with scsi inside...

Re:Hard part?

[zonix]

No problem!

I forgot to mention another cool thing about the installer.

The base install - for which only the first cd is needed - is quite light. The last step in the installation process is configuring APT (Advanced Package Tool) and optionally fetching the rest of the packages from the Internet (or more CD's), depending on your needs of course. If you skip the package selection, you're left with a small system that has a configured SSH server (protocol 2 only, no root login), mail and print, but no X Window System, Window Managers, or anything like that. Pretty neat.

z

Re:Hard part?

[trashme]

The old installer did have its quirks.

For example, when I installed Debian I wanted ext3 support from the get-go and I booted the installer with the bf24 option (this booted a 2.4 kernel instead of the defualt 2.2 kernel). Unfortunately, the dhcp-client package included on the CD did not work with the 2.4 kernel. This was easily fixed by replacing dhcp-client with pump (an alternative dhcp client).

It was easy fix, but only if you already knew about the bug.

Re:Hard part?

[Homology]

You need to insert some kernel modules manually during install (for NIC, sound, etc.), which means you'd have to know what hardware you're running. Familiarity with the Linux kernel's 'make menuconfig' module selection is an advantage here too because the selections in the Debian installer are the same (ie. same groupings).

Contrast this with an OpenBSD install : If the hardware is supported, it's ready for use when the kernel is loaded. No messing around with loading the correct kernel modules, not to mention to find them in the first place.

Re:Hard part?

[OmegaBlac]

What was the tricky part with the old installer?

Installing Debian with the old installer is simple. There are countless tutorials on the net to help you in this endeavor. This article from OSNews works very well --> The Very Verbose Debian 3.0 Installation Walkthrough.

I think people tend to trip over the selecting of modules they need to get certain devices to work. Also I guess newbies might have been intimidated when reaching the point to selecting packages with dselect or tasksel. I tend not to use that and just do a clean minimal base install and "apt-get install" what I need.

IMHO I prefer the old installer to the new one. It felt like a right-of-passage getting through the installation the first time and on subsequent reinstalls(practice makes perfect) I can install minimal Debian system in less then 30 minutes.

Re:Hard part?

[Den_onda_kotten]

The installer worked fine for me. But when it was finnished I had to spend many many hours trying to install sound card drivers, NVidia driver, get the scroll wheel on my mouse working, get a higher resolution than 800x600, etc.

Re:Hard part?

[anno1a]

It's the only way to fly! :)

Re:Hard part?

[cr0sh]

What would you cry about? DSELECT is nothing more than an interface to apt - with "/" and "\" for searching, it makes things fairly simple. Typically, I install first with Tasksel to get things up and going, the dselect to trim out the "fat" and add the stuff I want/need/try out.

I have only had a few complaints about DSELECT - most of them have to do with the keys (the return key seems to act about three different ways depending on what screen you are in - ESC sometimes doesn't work where "X" will, though they are supposed to be the same according to help). I also wish there was an easy way to group the modules together, then selectively go through the modules (ie, graphics or electronics), then open each and see what you want - that is an organization and UI issue more than anything else (and there might be a way to do it, I just haven't found it yet).

Re:Hard part?

[cr0sh]

I have had one problem with the Debian Woody installer, that took me a little bit of googling to find the answer for, so I think I will post it here as well to help others.

When I was installing Woody on a laptop, my NIC was a Netgear PCMCIA card - at a certain point in the install, but only if you have PCMCIA set up and a NIC in the slot - the ifconfig tables get hosed (routing), so at a certain point, you get stuck in a loop in the installer where it says that the network must be set up, even though it *is* set up previously.

The only way out of it is to set up the PCMCIA then the network, then before going further into the install, toggle to a new console and login as root, "ifconfig eth0 machine-ip up" (where "machine-ip" is the address you assigned to the box), then several "route del..." and "route add..." commands to re-add the proper routes all back in (because they get hosed in some manner by the install). Once this is all done, logout of the console, switch to the install console and continue.

If you are installing PCMCIA without a NIC installed in it, it works OK. If you aren't installing PCMCIA, it works OK. Only if you are installing PCMCIA, with a NIC in on of the slots - will you find yourself trapped in the loop.

Any /.'ers out there who wish to add to this explanation (because I kept it VERY brief), please do!!!

Re:Hard part?

[zonix]

What would you cry about?

My best guess, in a beginners' case, would be frustration. Even the dselect documentation states "If you are eager to get Debian running as soon as possible, well, you shouldn't use dselect". I guess this throws most people off during the last step of the install. Of course you still have the option to not run dselect during this step, but I'm sure most people are curious the first time they install Debian and will be tempted. :-)

Don't get me wrong, I've used dselect myself several times. In the end I just found it too cumbersome to browse the several thousand available packages with it. For some of the same reasons you mention by the way.

Apt-get and apt-cache themselves truly are easy to use! It used to be that dselect made more use of the packages meta-data, such as "suggested package" info, whereas apt-get did not. However, new versions of apt-get support this as well. There still may be other advantages to using dselect though, YMMV.

z

Re:Hard part?

[cr0sh]

Yeah - the first time I installed Debian I bitched about dselect - I did something and hit return when I shouldn't have, and it continued with the install and installed about 1 gig or so of stuff I didn't want. Since I am a stubborn bastard, I decided I would figure it out and sat down for a long while learning what did what in it. I agree that dselect is not for a beginner to Linux (I am not a beginner, and the interface threw me even).

As far as browsing the packages, I found it daunting, but fun at the same time - every time I look I am absolutely amazed at the sheer number amount of software available. Sadly, though, I was depressed that some of the packages were woefully out of date (Mozilla on Woody is 1.0.0!!!). Even so, the number of packages and stuff leaves me with thoughts of what I could do the next time around, or knowing that if I need something, I can check the discs first and maybe it will be there. Most distros are good at giving you a lot of options, but Debian seems to provide all of them, and not just a subset.

This can be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it and your level of experience...

Re:Hard part?

[swillden]

You need to insert some kernel modules manually during install (for NIC, sound, etc.), which means you'd have to know what hardware you're running

Only if you need to use that hardware to perform the install. If you're installing over the net, for example, you need to load code to run your NIC. I can't think how your sound card would be important to the installation process, though...

Re:Hmm..

[kfg]

Try booting from floppy and copying the .cab files to the HD first.

KFG

More links

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to try the installer, don't forget to take a look at the errata. The installer also has a lot of untriaged active bug reports which Joey Hess has asked for help dealing with. Sure, file a report of something doesn't work, but make certain that it isn't a known issue first.

Help triaging those bug reports would be a helpful task for anyone knows how to work their bug tracker.

Bootloaders

[Spy Hunter]

Why oh why hasn't someone come out with a bootloader that detects what OSes are installed _itself_? It can't be that hard. I mean, if there's an NTFS partition, it's not that hard to guess what OS is installed there and how to boot it. For Linux, it's a little more complex. But since GRUB can read Linux filesystems, it could at least look in the /boot directory for promising kernel-type files and put them in the menu for you. I don't know about other OSes, but even if the autoconfiguration only worked for Windows and Linux, it would be a huge step up bootloaders. Think how many newbies would be saved from making their computer unbootable (the scariest thing that can happen to a would-be Linux convert)!

Re:Bootloaders

[MobyTurbo]

if there's an NTFS partition, it's not that hard to guess what OS is installed there and how to boot it.

No, the same partition identification for NTFS is also for OS/2. For this reason, unlike FAT partitions, NTFS partitions are configured manually in some distros.

Re:Bootloaders

[bcmm]

Maybe not so good for day-to-day use, but that would make a pretty cool rescue disk...

Re:Bootloaders

[FooBarWidget]

That's great, and what about multiple kernel versions? /boot in a different partition that /? Etc. etc.

Re:Bootloaders

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... that's exaclty what the FreeBSD bootloader does. It's not very fancy, but it's quite capable. Another nice feature is that it will default to booting the last system you booted into (no need to configure a default if you usually boot into the same OS).

Re:Bootloaders

[(H)elix1]

That's great, and what about multiple kernel versions? /boot in a different partition that /? Etc. etc.

That is what 'expert' mode should be for - the folks who know the internals well enough can do grub or lilo by hand. There should be a next>next>next>finished option for those who are happy to live with a set of well thought out defaults.

Re:Bootloaders

[FooBarWidget]

Isn't that exactly what the installers already do for you? When I installed Fedora, it automatically detected by Windows partition and made a "DOS" entry for it.

Re:Bootloaders

[idiotnot]

swirling lights of the wayback machine.....

I actually installed NT on a HPFS partition one time. 16-bit filesystems rock. Heh. Actually, IIRC, MS owned the design to HPFS and IBM really couldn't do anything with it to move it forward (although, JFS is probably a better choice anyway). HPFS got updated and became NTFS in NT 3.1. HPFS support in NT officially died with WinNT 3.51, although I think you could still read them by copying over some files in NT4 and Win2k

Here is a good brief article from MS on their filesystems.

Re:Bootloaders

[CAIMLAS]

Why is this not moderated "Funny"?

I've not seen a linux distro that -hasn't- done this since, what, Redhat 5.2?

Re:Bootloaders

[(H)elix1]

Not sure. Don't know debian's installer, but Gentoo does not. Grub does a pretty good job of figuring out HDD geometries, but does not take a stab at setting up any kernel. Speaking of linux (rather than win32, hurd, or any other options - don't know them from grub.conf's view) it would be nice if grub guessed what kernels might be in /boot as part of the setup.

Personal example - I'm most of the way through the third stage on getting Gentoo 2004.1 running on a new laptop. Just configured grub - made a typo, twice - and the reboot gave me a (very hard to read) file not found. My bad, I typo'ed and forgot to add kernel-2.4.25-gentoo-r2 and the gentoo in initrd... but could not see the forest through the trees on that one. It would have been nice to for it to look at the possible candidates and stub them up as well. Might just scratch that itch once I get my "bonehead's guide for gentoo on a t41p - authored by a qualified bonehead" done. The wifi and xwindows will be the death of me yet.

Re:Bootloaders

[Spy Hunter]

The bootloader doesn't do it. The installer does it. If you change anything afterwards, you're screwed. Plus, Debian's installer hasn't done it until now.

Re:Bootloaders

[Spy Hunter]

Well then there's two possibilities. Is it so hard to tell the difference between Windows and OS/2? All that's needed is a simple heuristic to tell the difference. Sure, it might not work for the next version of windows when it comes out, but at least it would work in the vast majority of cases. In fact, even if it failed for OS/2, it would still work in the vast majority of cases :-). If OS/2 was installed and you didn't know how to configure your bootloader, it would just fail to work. Which is exactly what happens now when you don't know how to configure your bootloader, except that it fails in _all cases_ instead of just on OS/2. So it would still be a huge improvement. Just because it can't work perfectly doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

Re:Bootloaders

[Spy Hunter]

Multiple kernels versions would all be put in the menu. /boot on a different partition wouldn't be that hard either. Linux kernels are pretty easy to detect, so it could realize that one partition was full of them in its root. It's also pretty easy to detect root filesystems (presence of /etc, /usr, etc). The bootloader could give you a choice of kernels with a choice of root filesystems. If it turns out one of the combinations doesn't work, then oh well, boo hoo, that option doesn't work when the user tries it. Who cares? It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to give at least one working option so the computer isn't unbootable.

Of course it can't work in every convoluted case, so in some cases you would still need to configure it (and of course you would be able to override the detection if you are a bootloader guru who loves partitioning his hard drive into tiny useless chunks). But at least it would work without configuration in the vast majority of cases, instead of requiring precise configuration in _every_ case. If it worked in almost all cases, don't you agree that would be a big improvement?

Re:Bootloaders

[CAIMLAS]

Er, why would you want to bootloader to do it? It's not really a practicality. There's only so much space with which the bootloader has to work with, afterall.

Re:Bootloaders

[MobyTurbo]

Well then there's two possibilities. Is it so hard to tell the difference between Windows and OS/2? All that's needed is a simple heuristic to tell the difference.

I agree with you, let's make yet another Linux distro that does that. ;-)

Re:Bootloaders

[Spy Hunter]

What do you mean it's not really a practicality? From where I'm standing, one of the major problems with installing and using Linux today is getting the bootloader set up correctly. Red Hat may set up its bootloader fine in the case of a dual-boot with windows, but what if there is another distro installed you would also like to boot? Red Hat will overwrite your old bootloader, and it's back to editing bootloader files, where one error could make your system unbootable. What if you want to install a new kernel? You'll likely need to edit your bootloader files. Given how easy it would be to include some simple heuristics in the bootloader to detect installed kernels, and how much pain it causes when a system is unbootable because of a misconfigured bootloader, I should think it's a no-brainer to add autoconfiguring support in. There's no reason a bootloader should need any setup at all for most cases. Even for power users, there's no point in making things harder than they have to be. GRUB already has filesystem-reading capabilities and a command prompt with tab-completion. The amount of code autodetection would take is small compared to all that.

You may think that it should be the job of the distro to manage the bootloader configuration, but I think that's the wrong place to put the burden. That way, the quality of your distro determines the quality of your bootloader management; I don't want a bad package to be able to make my entire system unbootable. Plus, having multiple OSes all trying to cooperate in managing the same bootloader is just asking for trouble. So many problems are solved quite simply if the bootloader just doesn't need any configuration to do its job. It's easier, it's more elegant; I can't see any disadvantages.

Might I ask why Debian still uses 2.4

[revolvement]

As it's default kernel? I thought that the 2.6 kernel has matured enough to be a stable default?

Re:Might I ask why Debian still uses 2.4

[Anonymous Coward]

What you really should say is:
Oh... They finally moved up to 2.4.

Re:Might I ask why Debian still uses 2.4

[krmt]

Because 2.4 has been heavily tested within the installer, so we know it's good. 2.6 has only just been put in, and it needs a whole lot more testing before it makes sense as the default. We'll still provide it, of course, as an alternative boot option, but there's no reason to break the installer just so the shiny new toy can be the default when the old one works perfectly well.

And therefore new Debian stable Coming Soon

[Rizzer]

It's probably worth mentioning that development of the new installer has been the chief technical obstacle to the release of a new version of Debian stable. So with debian-installer nearing completion, this means the next version of Debian stable is also nearing completion.

Rizzer (Drew Parsons)

Re:And therefore new Debian stable Coming Soon

[bhmit1]

You're forgetting that the recent decision to remove firmware and documentation that do not adhear to the social contract may push the next release out until 2005.
That's not to say that there isn't a resolution to try to reinterpret or create an exception for this release. In which case, you would be right, this installer has been key to the release.

Re:And therefore new Debian stable Coming Soon

[Rizzer]

Not forgetting, simply trying to inspire hope :)

My vote will go to fixing these nit-picking social contract violations after sarge. After all, the social contract also says "4. Our priorities are our users (and free software)" (parentheses added).

Drew

Re:And therefore new Debian stable Coming Soon

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean it will be out before 2007?

pride

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason debian wont be optimised is because the gatekeepers on debian-devel argue that optimisation dont make programs run faster (seriously).

I think the real reason is pride, they are afraid of lossing face and admitting they were wrong. Admitting they were wrong would make it harder to start arguments in the future.

They argue that debian packages are optimised, the kernel for example has multiple packages each optimised for a different cpu.

The minimum that needs to be done is to modify policy to require packages that can be optimised to have support for end users compiling optimised for themself.

Having precompiled optimised packages for every flavour of every architecture may place excessive burdens to the debian infrastructure.

Currently debian grants monoply powers over package managment, so if you get one ludite of a package manager (you know who you are) who thinks CPU architecture hasnt evolved since the 386 then its just bad luck, if its in policy they have to fix it or get out of the way so someone else can.

Debian has massive problems to overcome if its to remain as the number 1 community developed distribution.

Re:pride

[JohnFluxx]

Do you have any links to show that there will be a noticable increase if compiled for 686 etc?

Re:pride

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had the choice of 2 GHz athlon or a 2.1GHZ athlon at the same price, which one would you take ?

If the user wants to compile the package him/herself for _whatever_ reason, the packaging system should dumb it down to i386. No point forcing compatibility on users who dont need it.

It doesnt matter how much faster it makes it, its for the user to decide if the tradeof of compiling the package him/herself is worth it.

One of primary goals of a distribution should be to give a shit about efficiency.

Re:pride

[Crazy Eight]

You know if you want you could just install "pentium-builder". Barring that it would take the addition of one line of shell code to the rules file to add any CFLAGS you like.

Re:pride

[Crazy Eight]

The reason debian wont be optimised is because the gatekeepers on debian-devel argue that optimisation dont make programs run faster (seriously).

That's patently false. They just don't think the speed (around 9%) is worth the effort.

I think the real reason is pride, they are afraid of lossing face and admitting they were wrong.

LOL! You've got to be kidding. This distribution is regularly the butt of /. jokes that run along the lines of, "Hey, so I hear Debian is about drop a.out and maybe even make the jump to libc6." If they wanted to invest some ego in a public face there are other things that would play second fiddle to technical matters before they got around to "looking cool" in front of the "133t".

Admitting they were wrong would make it harder to start arguments in the future.

Uhh... Huh?

They argue that debian packages are optimised, the kernel for example has multiple packages each optimised for a different cpu.

Well, that is the most important optimization to make.

The minimum that needs to be done is to modify policy to require packages that can be optimised to have support for end users compiling optimised for themself.

Why bother when you can just install a Debian package that adds that functionality?

Re:pride

[JohnFluxx]

you're just plain confusing.
what's the cpu thing got to do with it?
how is the rest of it answering my question?
and if the primary goal _is_ to 'give a shit', doesn't that contadict what you said before?

Re:pride

[JohnFluxx]

yes, that is correct.
But doesn't answer my question does it?

Re:pride

[Nothinman]

The minimum that needs to be done is to modify policy to require packages that can be optimised to have support for end users compiling optimised for themself.
Having precompiled optimised packages for every flavour of every architecture may place excessive burdens to the debian infrastructure.

May? Do you have any idea what the disk space requirements alone would be? And how far should it go? Should we have i486, i586 and i686 packages to make sure everyone's covered?

If you really want custom compiled packages either do it by hand for the few that might matter (apt-get source) or look at apt-build which can be setup to recompile everything on your system.

Re:pride

[Crazy Eight]

Hi John. I think we've both responded to the AC above but it's ended up looking like we're talking to each other or some such thing. I can't quite decipher the thread of this conversation. However, if the question you're referring to is the one about i686 binaries, this page has some interesting studies. He's mostly concerned with tuning Athlon XP binaries via --fxxx type flags, but begins with tests of march=foo. That parameter doesn't pay off until i686 and gets another nice bump at march=athlon-xp. The skinny from his benchmark in that case yields a 9% improvement over plain ol' i386.

He got some pretty significant gains by tweaking the more detailed flags beyond march, but the code in question is floating point computational stuff. That's good to know since it means tweaking a renderer or whatnot will be worth the effort, but it says nothing about yer meat and potatoes binaries.

Incidentally, an anonymous poster pointed out that Debian has an i686 libc in unstable now. I'll install it the next time I do an upgrade, but I ain't gonna bother recompiling 850 packages.

Re:pride

[JohnFluxx]

Thanks.
I was replying to someone saying that debian should recompile everything for i686, and be quite rude about it, without any evidence that it would actually make a difference.
9% is a good improvement. But also remember that I believe they are compilied for 686, but with support for 386.
( I get the march and mcpu mixed up - but one being 686 and one being 386)
So the comparision should be between a debian compiled package, and a home brewed package.

I suspect that for 99% of apps, it will make no difference - particulary if libc is compilied for 686. (btw, how do you get that then?)

Re:pride

[Crazy Eight]

If you're running unstable the package name is libc6-i686. It installs in addition to libc6 and only kicks in with a 2.6 kernel.

that is exactly why I posted the message

[hak1du]

fail to meet Debian's strict standards. The installer must operate on all of Debian's supported architectures.

Yes, Debian has some strict standards. Yes, it is good if they work on a universal installer that conforms to strict standards.

None of that makes Knoppix any less of an excellent installer for Debian. The Debian project should be announcing Knoppix and other live CDs prominently on their home page, rather than creating the impression that there are no finished installers.

If i386 with a CD drive is what you've got then Knoppix is for you.

Yes, like 95% of Debian users.

But don't ever think that it can be the installer for Debian. It just isn't up for the challenge.

The notion that there should be "the installer" is itself flawed. Many different people need many different kinds of installers.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Anonymous Coward]

The notion that there should be "the installer" is itself flawed. Many different people need many different kinds of installers.

Fine. However, if a software package can't run on some of the platforms that Debian supports then it can't be a part of the Debian operating system. It might be available for Debian, but it isn't part of it.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[tokul]

>> If i386 with a CD drive is what you've got then >> Knoppix is for you.
>
>Yes, like 95% of Debian users.
>

Some might care about 5% too. :)

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[bfree]

The notion that there should be "the installer" is itself flawed. Many different people need many different kinds of installers.

And this is exactly the issue that debian-installer wants to address, by creating a modular framework to be used for installing debian. One of the original promises was that a gui would be slapped on around it and one of the obvious benfits of the new method is that it seems to be far easier to shape the installation (so a corporation could create their own tweaked installer internally which always does X,Y,Z). Debian-installer is not "the installer" it is "the installer framework", this doesn't stop others from creating their own independant installers, but it seems like a far more questionable occupation when you can just tweak d-i (and possibly hit 9+ platforms). I wouldn't be at all surprised if d-i is relatively ignored (except for the fact that reviews will start saying "new installer just works, simply") until a while after it reaches version 1 (sarge release?), but then I wonder if all the other OS's mightn't start asking "Anaconda, why? why not just use d-i?". The bottom line is horses for courses and debian are trying to train a horse decathlete!

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Kjella]

If i386 with a CD drive is what you've got then Knoppix is for you.

Yes, like 95% of Debian users.

Are there numbers to back that up? If you said 95% of Linux users, I think you'd be correct. But my impression is very many non-x86 users choose Debian because it's the only one supporting their platform properly...

Kjella

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Anonymous Coward]

(Me again.)

None of that makes Knoppix any less of an excellent installer for Debian.

Knoppix has a first-class installer and I evangelize it alongside the installer for Debian. Knoppix is excellent whenever I encounter a Windows user who has recently been infected with a virus or who is interested in trying out Linux and Free Software.

I have never had any questions come back from users who have decided to run knx-hdinstall. There's no question that the Knoppix installer is both capable and user friendly.

I have also never had any requests for help with the new d-i. I used to help people all the time with the old boot-floppies. Of course, these are possibly different types of people.

Knoppix is not Debian. In the technical sense, Knoppix packages are very customized and would have to be uninstalled to be replaced with the appropriate Debian packages. In the social sense, Knoppix tries to be a demo of what Free Software is capable of. It does not try to be an enterprise-level server, provide a mechanism for distributing security patches ... simply put, it's not Debian and it isn't trying to be.

• If i386 with a CD drive is what you've got then Knoppix is for you.

Yes, like 95% of Debian users.

Of English or German-speaking, desktop-using, i386 CD drive wielding users with 2.2GB of disk space free. Don't forget that Debian is the most cosmopolitan of all OSes as web servers. This is because Debian has chosen not to disadvantage minority users. Aside being a moral choice, it's a matter of quality control and quality assurance. Allowing some fraction to be disadvantage worsens the quality of Debian for that fraction. As an example, the installer will ship for all architectures and all languages at the same time.

The Debian Users Worldmap shows that France has the second largest concentration of Debian users, right above USA in third place. Knoppix French is a fork of its own, which shows Knoppix's popularity among French-speaking users.

I hope they share the same installer. Otherwise, the Installation Manual authors would need to document both. Imagine having different installers for each of eleven architectures, then different installers for each of ten supported languages! Who wants to write the installation manual for m68k/atari in Portuguese?

The notion that there should be "the installer" is itself flawed. Many different people need many different kinds of installers.

This is the real crux of your argument then, that installers should be targeted for the people who use them. Let me state that I don't think you're right. Instead, there are many different people need many different kinds of installs. The focus is on the result of the install, not on the installer itself.

One installer is capable of providing all of the different types of installations, in English, French and any language, on i386, PowerPC and any architecture, for servers, desktops and embedded control systems, and that installer is the debian-installer.

None of that lessens Knoppix's quality. If you think that Knoppix has will offer you a better system, more personalized to your tastes, then maybe you didn't want Debian after all. Just install Knoppix.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Anonymous Coward]

"But my impression is very many non-x86 users choose Debian"

Which summed up together are about two dozens of them.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[andrel]

The Debian popularity contest project is an attempt to measure which configurations of hardware and packages are most common among Debian users. One use for the data is figuring out which packages belong on the install CD since everybody uses them. Less popular packages go on the supplemental CDs. If one ignores the large chunk (over a quarter) of machines flagged unknown architecture, about 4% of popcon users are on non-i386 machines.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Nothinman]

How can you ignore the unknown chunk, if it was smaller maybe but not since it's 1/4th of the submissions.

Anyway I run Debian on 3 non-i386 machines and none of them have popcon on them and considering the page says there's only just under 5000 submissions, way too few people have it installed and 1/4th of them mucked it up somehow so I'd say popcon isn't a good gauge for anything right now

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has a decent installer, and Knoppix is even more friendly, but I still can't get Knoppix to identify my TRENDnet wireless card. I have drivers for Windows, and I've found drivers on Trendnet's site for Linux. Do I have to roll my own Knoppix distro to get them to work?

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Anonymous Coward]

knoppix leaves you with a testing/unstable mix that requires experiance to update

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[andrel]

Which better gauge do you propose? Imperfect data is much better than no data and n=5000 is a plenty big sample size from which to make statistically significant inferences. If you'd like your machines counted apt-get install popularity-contest

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Nothinman]

I'm not suggesting a better gauge and I don't think data that bad should be used, perhaps if 1/4 of it wasn't 'unknown' it wouldn't be as bad but as it stands now there's more Debian developers than entries in popcon. I mean hell there's 36541 people registered to the debian-announce mailing list and even that's probably a small percentage of the total amount of Debian installations.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[cmacb]

I like the Knoppix method of installation too. I've used it a couple of times when I just couldn't figure out how to configure a particular network or sound card on my own. Same thing goes for the Lindows (or whatever it's called) installer, and the Suse installer (I haven't tried Red Hat recently).

BUT, when done with those I notice I have a LOT of things I don't want installed and the system takes forever booting up (compared to Debian) as if it's doing a whole series of device detections at each boot.

For me, Debian represents a nice compromise between these totally automatic installers and the cookbook approach taken by Gentoo.

All of these variations have their place though and the nice thing about OSS that doesn't ever change is the variety of options available. The proprietary world will never understand that and will continue trying to produce a single product for the lowest common denominators out there.

Having recently installed Debian on my iBook I can appreciate the desirability for a common installer across all platforms. But I see no reason why others can't produce specialized installers as well. None of these are mutually exclusive.

Re:that is exactly why I posted the message

[Anonymous Coward]

Those 5% use rawrite to make a boot floppy because theue 386 won't boot off a CDROM

What does that mean?

[hak1du]

The problem with Knoppix is that it doesnt fit the "Universal Operating System" style of Debian.

And what does that mean? Does that make Knoppix any less of an excellent installer?

With Knoppix it would take me a lot of time just to uninstall packages I wouldn't use.

As with many other Linux desktop installations. However, with apt, it's easy to get rid of large chunks of functionality at once; for example, to remove KDE, just get rid of Qt. To get rid of the GUI, get rid of xlib and the X server.

Knoppix is great for desktops but it's not the best for everyone.

There is no "best" solution for everyone. Debian should recognize that and live with multiple installers.

A good choice would be to work with Knoppix or Gnoppix to make it an even better installer for desktop users, and separately develop a text-based "universal" installer.

Re:What does that mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you get on with your project to make a separate distribution for every platform and stop telling the rest of us what we should be doing?

Re:What does that mean?

[anarxia]

I used Knoppix a few times and I was very impressed, but it cannot replace the current installer because it's heavily desktop-oriented. That's what my point was.

I agree that the best way to satisfy all users is to have multiple installers, but Debian is ran by volunteers so it's unreasonable to expect them to develop or support multiple installers.

Phew!

[harikiri]

I'm glad they're supporting the three hurd users out there! ;)

Why libdetect for the installer ?

[phoxix]

Last I checked, this was some old Mandrake code that Mandrake stopped working on.

Any reason why they couldn't use Mandrake's newer hardware detection code (ldetect) ?

Or juse use Knoppix's Kudzu derivative)

Sunny Dubey

Re:Why libdetect for the installer ?

[mbanck]

Debian-Installer uses Progeny's discover for hardware detection, not libdetect.

Michael

Re:Why libdetect for the installer ?

[Anonymous Coward]

discover contains Mandrakesoft's libdetect code, read the AUTHORS file

Re:Why libdetect for the installer ?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/kudzu

Re:great! - EPIA C3's etc

[Anonymous Coward]

I run C3's (Samuels + Nehemiahs) - the first are not 686 compatible and I often find they will gag on distributions that implicitly assume a 686 - 586 stuff will run on these

Hmm...

[IshanCaspian]

...maybe that's because it's....well....DYING. ;)

These all do the same thing!!!

[simcop2387]

rm -rf /
rm -fr /
rm / -rf
rm / -fr
rm -r / -f
rm -f / -r

75% of all command line switches don't have any particular order! all of those when done as root will mess up your machine just as equally

Re:You can't beat Slackware

[afd8856]

In terms of init scripts, "light feeling", yes, it' s the best for a server. But for desktop, one might prefer Fedora, it has a lot more outside support (like ready made packages by various software developers, etc).

Re:You can't beat Slackware

[datadriven]

Why is that flamebait? But if it is call me a slackware troll too.

but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing in Linux needs to change- it was all written by God Himself, and is thus perfect as-is.

It's the world that needs to change, not Linux.

Re:but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing in Linux needs to change- it was all written by God Himself, and is thus perfect as-is.

Linux source code:

1. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.

2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

3. Remember thou keep the Sabbath Day.

4. Honor thy Father and thy Mother.

5. Thou shalt not kill.

6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

7. Thou shalt not steal.

8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife.

10. GOTO 1.

Re:but why?

[Bruce Perens]

You goofed. The numbers should start with 0.

Re:You can't beat Slackware

[trashme]

Why? Because the parent post is largely unrelated to the topic as well as making claims with absolutely no facts to back them up.

Quick Problem Detection......

[joel48]

The errata list for this release is already longer for the version that was released....yesterday, than any of the previous versions' list has become.... Is that more testing, or issues carried over?

Debian Installer Errata

Q: new to debian...

[feelyoda]

Hi.

I want to install a minimal install of Linux on a compactflash card serving as a hard disk on an embedded system. The system will be on a higly-mobile robot, where anything but sold-state is bound to fail(though I'm testing the new Seagate drives).

Anyway, I want a minimal install because the capacity is a mere 2GB, and I'm new to Linux & Debian.

I'm working with a 1GHz PIII -- what type of iso should I get for the install? I see choices like "alpha," "hppa," "i386," and "powerPC".

What do all these mean. I would guess my pentium is i386, right?

Also, what does "NONUS" mean?

Thanks!

Re:Q: new to debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pentium is i386
NONUS is things which cannot be exported from the US, mostly crypto software

Re:Q: new to debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll help if I can ...

i386 = Intel PC. I have Debian running on most of my AMD boxes using this disc.

NONUS = IIRC, software not developed in the United States. I just choose to select this as part of my apt-setup for inclusion with my /etc/apt/sources.list I figure if I can get a cool program developed in another country, why not?

Re:Q: new to debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

more like software that can't be used in the us, but everywhere else (think patents).

Re:Q: new to debian...

[Wakkow]

If you want to use Debian, I suggest trying it out on a desktop machine first. It'll work great for your embedded system, but unless you have the basics down, it'll be hell trying to get it working off the bat.

Anyways, I think you should skip dselect and taskel and install everything from apt-get. Sure, you have to apt-get everything you need at first, but you'll have a small system without the extra unnecessary junk that follows along.

Re:Q: new to debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, what does "NONUS" mean?

That you don't get any NUS during the install.

the debian installer SUCKS for me. Even though I u

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though I use debian.
I have my / on a raid array. Woops, the debian installer can't even see it.
I have a scsi cdrom, oops the debian installer can't see it.

Re:Hmm..

[OmegaBlac]

have you tried "emerge debian-installer"? can't seem to get it to work on mine..

Maybe that is due to emerge having not finished compiling itself yet...

RTM

[idiotnot]

GRUB can read FFS.

root (hd0,a)
kernel /boot/loader

It has worked okay for me with OpenBSD, FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x (on a UFS1 partition...can't do UFS2 yet).

NetBSD for whatever reason didn't like it and had to be chainloaded on my machine. I think this is related to thier change in binary format, and grub not catching up.

I actually prefer to use grub on FreeBSD machines over their boot selector, because if there's a problem, I can boot the old kernel easier.

Re:You can't beat Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because the parent post is largely unrelated to the topic as well as making claims with absolutely no facts to back them up.

Yeah, you can't do that here. Debian hates that kind of competition.

Re:apt-get poll

[Hrothgar The Great]

Thanks for the polls, you guys are making this cesspool almost halfway fun again.

So in about 6 years we'll have this in stable?

[Mustang Matt]

I generally don't have difficulty installing debian using bf24, but when I do I do a bootstrap install off of a knoppix cd for the extra hardware support.

Re:So in about 6 years we'll have this in stable?

[Jetson]

I generally don't have difficulty installing debian using bf24, but when I do I do a bootstrap install off of a knoppix cd for the extra hardware support.

As numerous people have pointed out, installing from Knoppix sounds like a trip down Easy Street until some later date when an upgrade hoses your system because of non-standard dependencies.

The best solution I've found (for odd network hardware, particularly) is to install as much as I can using the Debian installer and then load only the kernel and modules from Knoppix. Assuming the odd hardware is recognized by the Knoppix kernel, that will get me to the point where I can do a network update and download a new kernel source.

Re:So in about 6 years we'll have this in stable?

[Mustang Matt]

I don't do an install to the HD of knoppix. I simply boot knoppix for the extra hardware support so I can partition and format drives on funky scsi controllers, etc. Seems like older IBM servers are the worst offenders when it comes to getting things setup with debian.

Debian installer sucks and Debian too

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the Debian installer sucks. It's the worst installer have ever tried. Debian GNU/Linux also sucks (except apt). Too many questions when upgrading, etc. FreeBSD, Slackware Linux and Fedora Core are easier to install, maintain and you won't have as many security advisories as Debian has. See www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/ for more info.

Dont try it with FreeBSD

[Billly Gates]

I tried beta2 and it ate both the Windows MBR and the FreeBSD one. My system was unbootable.

Oddly a simply reinstall of FreeBSD will fix both the Windows MBR and its own bootloader

Re:Sorry to spoil your trolling fun...

[Alan]

The parent post isn't a troll, the wilwheaton link does indeed do as he says.

My little problem with Debian...

[Dimensio]

I dual boot between Winows and Debian Linux. Recently I went through a massive hardware upgrade -- changing out motherboards (and any integrated hardware on it), CPU. Naturally, Windows throws a temper tantrum and has to be reinstalled (Linux just needs a kernel update to accomidate the new drivers). As anyone who dual-boots knows, installing Windows overwrites the master boot record, killing anything that Lilo had put there. To get it back, you need a Debian boot or rescue disk/disc to re-run Lilo.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a Debian disk/disc that will work! They all seem to hang when I try to load modules for my SCSI card (which is strange, because my SCSI device -- an Adaptec 29160 which is where my root drive is located -- has not changed). I finally had to grab a Suse CD image and use that.

Windows XP shat itself when I changed out sound cards (Linux didn't even need a kernel changeout), so it needs to be reinstalled again. I am not looking forward to this.

Re:My little problem with Debian...

[ASIO]

I have the same card. Use rescbf24 root=/dev/sdXX.

Works fine here.

And did you report any of this?

[Xtifr]

I hope you also sent these comments to the installer dev team? This is beta software, after all. Posting complaints on slashdot may help others avoid the problems you encountered, but is unlikely to result in the problems actually getting fixed.

Sarge Install Spat The Dummy without Net Connect

[AShocka]

I've had Woody running before but trashed it because I had trouble updating JDK to the latest version, although I find apt-get in general, fine.

Because I'm on a slow modem, I purchase a 12 set Sarge CDs (4 April burn). The problem I had was that it required a net connection to check for security updates during installation. I was given an option of doing this (Y/N). If I choose yes, it dialed into my ISP, logged on OK, but then dropped the line (which some of my Linux/FreeBSD installs do). After this, there is no recovery. The same if I choose N, the install just hung every time.

I looked through the Debian Installer bug list and couldn't find any reference to such a bug and just concluded (probably falsely) that everyone installing Debian had a good net connection.

To me this is poor design. It's really offputting when any software shows such problems with the install that is obviously poor design and implementation in the installer.

I'm having different problems with trying to install Xandros, then after that build a complete Debian server behind it. But that's something I'll take up with Xandros.

Re:Sarge Install Spat The Dummy without Net Connec

[AShocka]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention I don't mind a good text based installer at all if Debian has to do that for cross platform support, just as long as it is user friendly and has a logical workflow.

Yippy Skip

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats to them. I'm sure they'll come up with an installer that's even more user-friendly, colorful, bloated, overly-functional, buggy, and generally assinine than the last. Maybe they'll even import recent versions of the userland into their dust-covered "stable" distro. I've yet to find a Linux distro that doesn't make me violently angry. If they're not bloated, commercialized, and broken, they're broken, bloated, disorganized, and only half there. Get it in your heads maintainers: I don't need a choice of three different bootloaders, nor do I need an "enhanced" vi with plugins for (pick your obscure scripting language) syntax highlighting -- but I do expect it to be in the default distro and configured properly so that it works. No, I don't think "nano" is acceptable as an editor for /etc/fstab. What I do want is an install where I can bring up the network and a firewall without having to rebuild the kernel 10 times. I don't think the config file for building a typical kernel really needs to have over 200 lines long, even if you go to the trouble of annotating it so that you don't have to depend on a bloated graphical configurator to figure out what LEET_DRIVER_FOR_FRYELECTRONICS_XL4B_SND_CRD="y" refers to. As for portage, just download the goddamned dist files and dependencies, build them, and install them so that I can use them instead of going back to the man page 10 zillion times to figure out how to do just that. Better yet, use this little utility called "make" instead so that you have a chance of keeping one part of your tree in sync with the other.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not a Windows bigot, *BSD-bigot, OSX-bigot, Solaris-bigot, or (chuckle) Slackware-bigot. It's just that attempting to use Linux for any worthwhile endeavor (apart from tinkering) makes me appreciate those other OS's all the more. Do I think Linux has a chance of seriously threatening Windows? No.

Re:Yippy Skip

[seb249]

At the risk of responding to a troll - i have started converting my servers from a mix of RedHat and Mandrake boxes to Debian, and to be honest i love it!
I dont know what installer you are talking about being bloated but in 3.0 rc2 its not that bad, sure it doesnt have the nice pretty buttons and all but realistically how often are you at the installer ?
The package maintainers i feel put a lot more though t into their packagers than some other distro's and usually i have found things work pretty well "out of the box" As for the hardware detection - well yes that can be a pain (having just built a HP DL380 with the onboard broadcom nics, i know what a pain it can be) but the way i see it is, use the right tool for the right job, and so far i am thinking server wise, it is the right way to go. (Have been running it on my own home servers for a couple of years now).

Anyway use whatever makes you happy

bullshit

[hak1du]

You mean you didn't carefully look at it, and then you didn't see where the problems were, don't you?

No, I mean that I have installed half a dozen machines that way, used them extensively, and never experienced any problem due to Knoppix. Installs using the Debian installer have always been much more of a headache.

do you really think any of those packages are going to be upgraded on a dist-upgrade? Do you really think anyone of them is going to be deleted due to an asked dependency (pointing to "real" Debian) on an upgrade? What do you think will happen when both foo and foo-knoppix are installed in the same machine?

The right thing seems to be happening normally. After all, the Knoppix installer is there for installing this thing. If you really need to get rid of a knoppix package by hand, it's easy to find them all and replace them with their Debian equivalents, automatically even if you like.

Besides, if there were problems, then Debian could work with Knoppix to solve them to make Knoppix an even better installer for Debian.

I hope...

[Kickstart70]

I hope it doesn't force me to use that piece of crap GRUB, like the current one does. Of course, calling it a p-o-c is just my opinion. I just want -choice- of boot managers. GRUB does the job, but it's a real pain to recover if you screw up with it. KS

Hard to see why

[MightyPalm]

I have a really hard time understanding all the problems with the debian installer.
Sure, the old installer didn't have a fancy gtk interface (the new one doesn't either, yet). Sure, there's no real autodetection of hardware, but fact is, it doesn't take a phD to use it.

Most of the drivers is already in the preshipped kernel, and its not really hard to locate your network card amongst the modules. With the network running, you can have an install ready in 20 minutes.
The menu's are straightforward, all the options needed to get a base system running is there, what more can you ask for?

Sure, the sound might not be working out of the box (remember to add yourself to the group), or some devices might not be in the kernel shipped with the installer (and you can't expect anyone to be able to work modconf, even though its pretty friendly). But who wants to be running the shipped kernel anyway? First thing to do after installing should be grabbing a new kernel and compiling it.

Can you expect users to be able to configure and compile their kernel themselves? My answer would be: YES.
Alot of people not familiar to linux and other unix-like systems are setting up boxes to be their routers/gateways these days. These are boxes connected directly to the internet. And with a non-recent kernel, getting a local user == getting root. So if you're reading slashdot, using linux, and running the kernel shipped with your distro a long time ago, now is the time to learn how to get it up to date.
I'm willing to bet that any computer-illiterate can run through a kernel compilation in 20-30 mins.

question

[beforewisdom]

I understand the new installer only gives you a base install of sarge.......if you want the rest you have to apt-get it.

Not a good option for me as I am on dial-up

Looking around the web I found cd's and dvd's of sarge available, but at $50 a pop. Justified, as they give you EVERYTHING that is in Sarge.

Anyone know of cheaper alternatives?

Steve

Re:question

[lorcha]

Anyone know of cheaper alternatives?

Yeah. Burn the CDs at work/school/friend's house/Kinkos/library/anywhere with a broadband link. But I think $50 is about the going rate for a packaged Linux distro. Isn't Mandrake about $50? If you can afford it, it wouldn't kill you to just shell out the $50 and support your favorite OS. ;)

Some other things to consider. I happen to use sarge for all my home machines, and I wonder if you'll be happy with it over a dialup connection. I assume you are using sarge because you want to be on the bleeding edge, so remember when you burn those sarge CDs, they're gonna be out of date in 24 hours. Not horriably out of date, but if you burn sarge CDs and wait more than a few weeks to install, your first apt-get upgrade is gonna blow donkeys over dialup. Maybe you'd be happier with woody if you don't mind using old versions of stuff?

The other thing to consider is that maybe you'd be happier with Gentoo? Then you're only downloading compressable source rather than whole binary packages.

I mean, I'm sure people use sarge over dialup, but I know that if I don't apt-get upgrade for a few weeks or so it's a pretty big download.

Re:question

[beforewisdom]

Supporting Debian by buying sarge for $50 would be great, but the people selling sarge CD's are not Debian.

As far as the bleeding edge goes wouldn't that be SID?

I would be happy to buy a copy of woody, but many of the things I want in a system are seriously old in woody........so I would be right back where I am.....having to download a shitload on a dialup.

Downloading/burning the CD's at a friend's house is not an option as there are a huge number of ISOs for sarge.

Steve

Re:question

[lorcha]

Supporting Debian by buying sarge for $50 would be great, but the people selling sarge CD's are not Debian.

I can count 29 different companies that sell deb CDs. Maybe one has them for less than $50?

As far as the bleeding edge goes wouldn't that be SID?

sarge is 10 days behind sid. I consider that to be bleeding edge, but you're right, it's all relative, and sid is certainly 10 days more bleeding. ;)

I would be happy to buy a copy of woody, but many of the things I want in a system are seriously old in woody

What packages do you want from sarge? If it's not too many, you could theoretically run a mixed system. But, of course, if you want the latest X and kde/gnome or whatever, then you're pretty much screwed on woody.

Downloading/burning the CD's at a friend's house is not an option as there are a huge number of ISOs for sarge.

Is doing it on DVD an option for you? Otherwise, you're right. 12 CDs. Or you could just bite the bullet and let apt run all night downloading packages. You prolly only need a few hundred meg of that. Wasteful to download all 12 ISOs (much of which will be out of date in a month).

That is one heaping load of shit

[lorcha]

Don't get me wrong, I use Debian exclusively and I think it's great. But there is no way you can say that debian-installer is on par with the Mandrakes of the world. Is it easy to use debian-installer to blow away an old system and get the deb base installed? Yeah, it's reasonably easy. But to actually make the machine do something useful you've basically got two choices: aptitude, which is not easy to learn in 5 minutes and is too fine-grained, and tasksel which is too coarse-grained.

This is something Slackware had right way back in 1996. The fact that in 2004 the current "official" non-beta installer for debian requires the user to use dselect is borderline criminal. If I was going to show someone how great Linux was, there is no way in hell I'd hand him a debian-installer CD. Mandrake is a possiblity, so is Fedora, or Slackware. But debian-installer? Hahahahaha. Yer funny. I'd love to see my mom try to use it. Hahaha.

Hard part!

[lorcha]

right here. The current official installer (woody) just installs a base system with nothing on it other than, like, ls and rm, and then drops you into dselect to fend for yourself.

Why is that a problem? I'm glad you asked. dselect is a list of all 10,000 or so debian packages and you get to choose which ones you want. There goes your saturday. And sunday. And monday. Oh, did I mention dselect is also a pain to learn how to use?

Debian is great if you already know how to use it. I love debian. But it has a steep-ass learning curve.

That'll teach you

[lorcha]

to not make a lilo rescue disk like the install process instructs you. For shame. ;)

Ok, so I don't do it either. Maybe you'd like grub better than lilo, though? With grub, you can just type in the partition you want to boot from and what you want to boot and let it boot for you. All from the boot prompt. You don't need to have your boot preconfigured (although you can, and should, preconfigure your most common boot schemes... unless you really enjoy typing and interactive booting).

Also, to help with your current issue, you might enjoy the rescue disk that comes with GNU parted. It's pretty good and lets you do lots of stuff.

Grub by default

[lorcha]

It definitely uses grub by default, but I think you can still use lilo if you go into expert mode.

But what's wrong with grub? It's actually really easy to recover if you mess it up since you can just manually type in where you want to boot from at the boot prompt. With lilo, you get to go find your rescue disk if you mess it up.

Knoppix problems

[llefler]

No, I mean that I have installed half a dozen machines that way, used them extensively, and never experienced any problem due to Knoppix. Installs using the Debian installer have always been much more of a headache.

I have done quite a few Knoppix installs, and there are problems there. I have yet to do an apt-get upgrade where there weren't broken packages. Knoppix sets apt to 'testing', but it appears that they mix 'unstable' in the distro. Not necessarily bad, but it does cause some problems. I have had problems with KDE in the past where they only installed part of a package to save space. The most common problem seems to be files installed by multiple packages, and you end up doing a dpkg force overwrite quite often. Ran into it just like night upgrading to KDE 3.2.2. Of course you could say 'stick to stable and you won't have those problems', but debian stable is not something most people will want.

Knoppix really nice for newbies because if you really screw something up (like last weekend when I forced the wrong package and backleveled my KDE), it's easy to do a fresh install.

Honestly, Knoppix is the only reason I'm using debian. I love apt, but I have never gotten a usuable install from pure Debian.

Re:Knoppix problems

[hak1du]

Of course you could say 'stick to stable and you won't have those problems', but debian stable is not something most people will want. [...] I have yet to do an apt-get upgrade where there weren't broken packages. Knoppix sets apt to 'testing', but it appears that they mix 'unstable' in the distro.

Actually, I'd say "stick to unstable" and immediately replace whatever is in Knoppix's apt sources with the Debian unstable sources, then update and dist-upgrade your system.

If you are having problems with KDE, a simple way of fixing them is to do an "apt-get remove --purge libqt", followed by an "apt-get install kde" (since I don't use KDE, I usually omit the second step).

but I have never gotten a usuable install from pure Debian.

Well, I haven't either, but in some cases, that has just been because I gave up in frustration.

To be clear, Knoppix could be improved as a Debian installer, but I think it is already so useful for that purpose by accident that Debian should really build on that success. Maybe they could work with Knoppix to iron out any problems with package naming/dependencies.

Re:Knoppix problems

[llefler]

Actually, I'd say "stick to unstable" and immediately replace whatever is in Knoppix's apt sources with the Debian unstable sources, then update and dist-upgrade your system

Unstable isn't very good for new users. They'll get too many broken packages and no idea how to fix them. And god forbid they have a windows mentality when they learn the power of apt-get. A dist-upgrade will almost surely kill their system with the default 'testing' settings.

In regard to my problems with KDE, it came from not paying attention to what I was doing with apt. I had MythTV stable with apt-get testing. Both should have been set to unstable. When it had dependancy problems, I was stupid enough to try -forcing a package that backleveled KDE. Even installing the unstable KDE didn't clean up the mess. But if you install Knoppix, set apt to unstable, and then apt-get install KDE it takes you to 3.2.2 just fine.

Now that 3.4 is out, I need to burn it and see if it can now detect the sound card in my Dell. And they've added some support for wireless too.... Fortunately I have plenty of test boxes to work with.

Re:Sorry to spoil your trolling fun...

[rthille]

I just meta-moderated for the mod who moderated your post as a troll as 'unfair'. Not sure exactly what's going on, but the link 'wilwheaton.org' does sometimes show a nasty picture and sometimes redirects to wilwheaton.net, the official site.

Re:Sorry to spoil your trolling fun...

[Alan]

Thanks, was kinda wondering what was going on. Story is long done now, so hopefully won't be a problem anymore. I have the karma to burn anyway :)