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A Modern Woody Debian GNU/Linux Installer
An anonymous reader writes "With everyone around talking about how Woody has an outdated installer and lacks some new packages and hardware support, some people feel the urge to get to work. The result? A customized installer. It has a 2.4.26 version kernel, supports XFS, LVM, RAID and various hardware drivers. Comes along with vim, bash, you can even resize partitions using parted and you get postfix as the default MTA. It has two flavours, a business card CD and a miniCD version which will help you install a minimal Debian system or even a X Window desktop."
Should be good even for doing basic partitioning and FS prep before putting in a full distro.
- divide the installer code wisely, you will have UI part and the installer part (that does actual work, system-dependent) separated.
- GUI? It shouldn't be that hard. XFree86 for graphics installer are the same everywhere;
- Want to instal via serial port? No problem, just add another user interface module
- High-level language, not C. Sorry, C programs just need too much time to debug, and I don't see where would you have any benefits of using C in case of installer (installation process always takes time, and it mostly depends on HDD or network throughput)
- There are some OS, that lack an easy graphics mode installer. They could benefit
That would of course need a few megabytes of RAM and an isntallation CD. Is anyone booting off from floppy disks anyway? (what's a floppy disk, BTW?)Bevis and Butthead
/Bevis and Butthead
ahuhhuhhhuhh... he said woody.
Ninnle is the one distro that I feel most comfortable with. It's easy to install, configure, and maintain. People don't know what they're missing.
Anaconda only works in x86 (and sparc?), and debian has to install in 11 archs. Understand now?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Isn't this a contradiction? The whole point of a frozen release is that nothing changes. It's what allows Debian to say its system is remarkably stable.
If you change packages or change the kernel, it isn't Woody (the reknowned stable version) anymore, and instead becomes Sid (the more up-to-date, but labeled unstable version).
I wonder what the Debian overlords are going to do with this...
> 1. 2.2 kernel
2. Slap forehead, keep woody install CD in CD-Rom drive, reboot, read help by pressing F-whatever it says.
3. Instead of hitting return to boot, follow the directions you found in the help and do "bf24" at the prompt to boot into 2.4
4. Hopefully that gets you going...
I'm not saying woody is perfect - i've had to install PCI ethernet cards too many times because the default kernel won't do modern integrated ones... But it does support 2.4.18 which is much better than 2.2.
How long has kernel 2.6 been out now? Hence, why is this "up-to-date" installer stuck at 2.4?
1. Install Fedora Core 2
2. Install apt
3. Realize I have to add a bunch of extra repositories to get a half-way decent selection of packages
4. Still can't find packages for lots of stuff I had in Debian
5. Overlaps and conflicts between packages in different repositories causes havoc everytime I try to upgrade
6. Not so happy
The authors should provide a jigdo file. Then, the installer image could be built by hammering the FTP mirrors rather than their own space.
In addition, it would be possible to build such a boot image for non-x86 architectures; the reason of course, why none of these `better' approaches have replaced the current debian installer.
I hope this isn't a dumb question, but...
Do non-standard installers have an effect on security updates?
I've wondered about that with livecd distros that can set up debian systems on a hard disk. If they draw their packages from standard sources, you'd have to figure that the updates would come through ok.
But what about the things the installer itself sets up? Does it all come from packages that will be updated, or does some of the system come from files on the install media that aren't covered by package update?
# ln -s /usr/bin/apt-get ~/bin/Upgrade\ System
# UpgradeSystem install mozilla
# Upgrade\ System install mozilla-firefox
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
mozilla-firefox-dom-inspector
Suggested packages:
latex-xft-fonts
2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2846 not upgraded.
Need to get 10.5MB of archives.
After unpacking 397kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Of course all of the on-screen text refers to apt, but it can be done.
In serious reply, the reason it's not called Upgrade System is that that's not exactly what it does, and more importantly it's not the only way to do it. APT just happens to have been adopted by Debian. Why say Mozilla and not Web Browser? Because it's not the only web browser. Why say Mozilla and not Internet? Because the web is not the internet. Why say apt-get and not Upgrade System? Because apt is the method being used, and that's not precisely what it does.
Why be accurate instead of "friendly"? Because we tried friendly, and it's better to be accurate if that is the choice.
I want my Cowboyneal
Not sure why they started this since Debian has a project called Debian Installer. I have used on some very modern boards and it has really done an amazing job in detecting all my software and running a 2.4 kernel.
Please check out Debian Installer. I think you will be plesantly pleased
Sigs are dangerous coy things