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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings