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An anonymous reader writes "With everyone around talking about how Woody has an outdated installer and lacks some new packages and hardware support, some people feel the urge to get to work.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."

Comments

Cool

[The Bungi]

Certainly bridges the gap between the Supersize-me 700MB live CDs like Knoppix and the minimalist 10MB vim+kernel+GNU deals.

Should be good even for doing basic partitioning and FS prep before putting in a full distro.

Writing an installer? Make it portable. Please.

[dotz]

What I'd really like to see would be something universal and portable:

• 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?)

Re:Writing an installer? Make it portable. Please.

[Trepalium]

Is anyone booting off from floppy disks anyway? (what's a floppy disk, BTW?)

It's the thing your BIOS emulates when booting from most el torito bootable CD-ROMs.

A Modern Woody?

[warpSpeed]

Bevis and Butthead
ahuhhuhhhuhh... he said woody.
/Bevis and Butthead

Anaconda: Not Interesting (!!!)

[hummassa]

Anaconda only works in x86 (and sparc?), and debian has to install in 11 archs. Understand now?

Modern Woody?

[GregChant]

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...

Re:Yeah but...

[martinde]

> 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.

Re:Woody's "up to date"

[Anonymous Coward]

How long has kernel 2.6 been out now? Hence, why is this "up-to-date" installer stuck at 2.4?

Because it's installing Woody. And the most recent kernel in Woody is 2.4.

Please read up on the Debian release system before making clueless comments.

The Debian team has already done this

[peripatetic_bum]

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