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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."
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.
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).
apt-get install discover mdetect read-edid
will detect mouse, graphic card and monitor.
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.
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.
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
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?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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)
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.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
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.
Funnily, I had this same problem when I recompiled 2.6 without legacy tty support....
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.
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 :-) ).
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.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
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
Michael
discover contains Mandrakesoft's libdetect code, read the AUTHORS file
Use the expert mode, there's an option for static IP in that mode.
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
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.
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.
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
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
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.
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.)