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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."

5 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. The debian installer is now pretty damn good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. What about *BSD? by Homology · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

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

  3. that is exactly why I posted the message by hak1du · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:that is exactly why I posted the message by bfree · · Score: 4, Interesting
      The notion that there should be "the installer" is itself flawed. Many different people need many different kinds of installers.

      And this is exactly the issue that debian-installer wants to address, by creating a modular framework to be used for installing debian. One of the original promises was that a gui would be slapped on around it and one of the obvious benfits of the new method is that it seems to be far easier to shape the installation (so a corporation could create their own tweaked installer internally which always does X,Y,Z). Debian-installer is not "the installer" it is "the installer framework", this doesn't stop others from creating their own independant installers, but it seems like a far more questionable occupation when you can just tweak d-i (and possibly hit 9+ platforms). I wouldn't be at all surprised if d-i is relatively ignored (except for the fact that reviews will start saying "new installer just works, simply") until a while after it reaches version 1 (sarge release?), but then I wonder if all the other OS's mightn't start asking "Anaconda, why? why not just use d-i?". The bottom line is horses for courses and debian are trying to train a horse decathlete!

      --

      Never underestimate the dark side of the Source

  4. Re:Knoppix by luwain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.