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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."
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.
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.
They add detection for GNU Hurd, but not OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Funny, really.
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...
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)
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
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."