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New Debian Installer Coming Soon

Posted by michael on from the missing-link dept.

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."

4 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Knoppix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Knoppix by djupdal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Bootloaders by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?" `":" #");}
  4. Re:that is exactly why I posted the message by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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
    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings