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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)!
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings