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