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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.
have you tried "emerge debian-installer"? can't seem to get it to work on mine..
What's wrong with:
tar xvfz package
cd package
configure
make
make install
ldconfig
Are users getting lazy
Actually, there is an excellent Debian installer out, and it's been out for a while. It's called Knoppix. You can test compatibility at the store by booting into it, get a live preview of everything, and install a complete system with a recent set of packages with one command. While it uses KDE by default, it's easy to switch to Gnome.
it's good to see my state of the art hardware will be detected along with my DOS and hurd installations... now if only we can get nvidia to release drivers for DOS and the hurd, my audigy and RAID setup... those old DOS games without the speed limiters will trully fly on a 3gighz pentium... they'll have to put epilepsy warnings on them though...
On a side note, can anyone tell me why debian is still i386 compiled rather than i586? I heard one argument saying that although it was i386 they were optimized internally for the higher processors. Not trolling deb, just interested. Can any gurus give us a definitive answer?
with Debian is that the people who use it are way too nice. Brrr, that kind of thing just gives me the creeps.
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.
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.
I tried installing debian once, here were my impressions:
- X & video driver didn't install properly (but I fixed it).
- USB scrolling mouse (logitech) didn't install properly (but I fixed it as well).
- I couldn't get the sound card to work.
- I couldn't get the network card to work (this one sucked because I had to keep switching back and forth in order to get suggestions and then to try them).
- The people on irc.debian.org were very friendly and helpful.
It was the first time trying linux (about a year and a half ago), and I haven't tried it again, however I'm waiting for a slightly nicer installer. Maybe I'll try it now (It's Sunday, nothing else to do).
They add detection for GNU Hurd, but not OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Funny, really.
have you tried "emerge debian-installer"? can't seem to get it to work on mine..
Keep waiting...
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...
apt-get install discover mdetect read-edid
will detect mouse, graphic card and monitor.
If you're going to try the installer, don't forget to take a look at the errata. The installer also has a lot of untriaged active bug reports which Joey Hess has asked for help dealing with. Sure, file a report of something doesn't work, but make certain that it isn't a known issue first.
Help triaging those bug reports would be a helpful task for anyone knows how to work their bug tracker.
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?" `":" #");}
It's probably worth mentioning that development of the new installer has been the chief technical obstacle to the release of a new version of Debian stable. So with debian-installer nearing completion, this means the next version of Debian stable is also nearing completion.
Rizzer (Drew Parsons)
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
That's patently false. They just don't think the speed (around 9%) is worth the effort.
I think the real reason is pride, they are afraid of lossing face and admitting they were wrong.
LOL! You've got to be kidding. This distribution is regularly the butt of /. jokes that run along the lines of, "Hey, so I hear Debian is about drop a.out and maybe even make the jump to libc6." If they wanted to invest some ego in a public face there are other things that would play second fiddle to technical matters before they got around to "looking cool" in front of the "133t".
Admitting they were wrong would make it harder to start arguments in the future.
Uhh... Huh?
They argue that debian packages are optimised, the kernel for example has multiple packages each optimised for a different cpu.
Well, that is the most important optimization to make.
The minimum that needs to be done is to modify policy to require packages that can be optimised to have support for end users compiling optimised for themself.
Why bother when you can just install a Debian package that adds that functionality?
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."
Because 2.4 has been heavily tested within the installer, so we know it's good. 2.6 has only just been put in, and it needs a whole lot more testing before it makes sense as the default. We'll still provide it, of course, as an alternative boot option, but there's no reason to break the installer just so the shiny new toy can be the default when the old one works perfectly well.
"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."
I hope you also sent these comments to the installer dev team? This is beta software, after all. Posting complaints on slashdot may help others avoid the problems you encountered, but is unlikely to result in the problems actually getting fixed.
You goofed. The numbers should start with 0.
Bruce Perens.