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Debian Installer RC1 Is Out
rekt writes "The Debian crew has just announced the release of debian-installer RC1.
You can find versions of it for 11 different architectures at the d-i page.
This is one of the most flexible, modular installer architectures out there. As we near the release of sarge (debian 3.1) next month, it's important that we find and work out any bugs in the installer. Grab a copy and give it a shot!"
.. available at suprnova.org.
Debian 3.1 (Sarge) Release Candidate 1 - CD 1 of 12 ...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Security support for sarge is scheduled to begin today. Woody users may want to consider upgrading to sarge now, testing the upgrade path, and help out with reporting/fixing any bugs they encounter.
Only the md5sum needs to be hosted somewhere official.
http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/
Because I love all of you.
AIUI the installer is still text-based and looks pretty much like the old boot-floppies, but this time with good hardware detection, aptitude instead of dselect , and streamlined to minimize the number of questions.
However, the installer is very modular and it should be possible to write a graphical front-end. In fact, a prototype exists, but I'm pretty sure it won't be used for the release.
Anyone who still thinks that Debian is hard to install, please think again
A big up to Debian developers everywhere!
Co-operation beats competition
If you're using Debian now and want to help decide what's popular, please install Popularity Contest.
Here's the summary of the debian-installer from one of the main developers...
t ive-2004-08-07-19-46.html
//fatal
Joey Hess blog entry: http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/d-i_retrospec
I used an older build to install a system the other day, and I hardly even had to hit the Enter key. (ok, the system didn't work once it was set up, but that turned out to be my fault, not the installer's :) )
If you scan through some of those screens, you'll discover that the reason there are so many is that you can take branches in the installer: for instance, if you choose to set up RAID, you get a bunch of screens about the RAID configuration; if the network can't be set up via DHCP, you get screens about setting up the network. A fair number of the screenshots are also screenshots of progress bars, which are noninteractive. (and a huge improvement over the old installer, where you just watched a message like "Setting up the base system..." while the hard drive churned)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Yes, yes, parent is a troll. But...
Debian (stable) is geared towards server, the whole Gentoo thing is geared towards desktop or experimental.
Debian has always had the philosophy of free distribution and legal safety, I've seen none of this in Gentoo. I love the Debian philosophy.
Debian is a mature distribution with a strict QA, I still don't believe Gentoo has a decent QA "department" at all.
None of the datacenters/dedicated servers facility that I know offer Gentoo, for each one you mention supporting Gentoo, I can name 25 supporting Debian.
Gentoo has bleeding edge stuffs, that's why I don't want it.
Debian has complete support forum (debianplanet), a portal (debianplanet), ten times the number of mailing lists than Gentoo, local user groups, not to mention SEVERAL newsletters with real content.
Debian has Knoppix, etc based on it.
Debian has at least twice the number of worldwide mirrors compared to Gentoo;
As for "versions", you can upgrade from between Debian versions pretty much seamlessly.
Anyone know which discs are needed for what installation you might want?
For a normal installation you only need to get the first two or three discs. If you have a fairly fast internet connection, you can even go with the netinst image. This installs a base system, reboots, and then you can get every package you want from a local mirror.
j.
When are they getting with the times and making a decent graphical installer?
From http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ :