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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!"
It's great and all to be using bittorrent to help spread the bandwidth around, and in all likelihood the distribution is completely benign, and i know SN only provides links ... it's just that most people have learned long ago not to trust applications delivered by warez outfits.
I would personally much rather see that torrent being hosted somewhere more official.
And how easy would it be to trick someone who browses SN and casually decides to give this linux thing a try? How many people, after compulsively snarfing as many free files as they can get, habitually check the trackers that they use?
Those are some pretty shallow observations there.
What I see is an installer that keeps with the Debian traditions but streamlines and improves.
Did you notice that there are more features? Look at the module selector, the network configuration, the partitioner, or the LVM and RAID stuff. How about its ability to display Chinese, Cyrillic and Greek characters? I thought that was pretty cool. You don't see that in many console applications.
"Graphical" installers mean nothing. A graphical installer would ask the same questions but cause an unnecessary hardware dependency, which complicates things. A graphical installer would make things sluggish and error-prone, and you can forget about serial console. "red-hat-ish" installers are much worse than this thing. Stick to the basics. Stick to what works.
Mods and flamers get ready: I'm about to criticize Debian (even though it's my favorite distro).
The fact that there are 231 screenshots of the new installer should raise some flags. 231!! Excluding a handful of error screens and progress bars, that suggests that in some circumstances the user would have to field more than 200 interactive prompts during the installation process. I should hope that many of these can either be consolidated or eliminated.
I had high hopes (too high) about the new hardware detection; I would be happy if these kinds of prompts disappear from the final build. You know the kind... the ones that require either clairvoyance, a second computer for hardware research, or the degree of advance preparation that only the IRS would demand.
I'm running gentoo and I like it but that doesn't mean that it is superior to other distros, nor that everyone has to like it too, nor that it meets everyones needs.
So please do yourself, slashdot and most of all gentoo a favor and STFU! Trolls like you are giving gentoo a bad name and the people working on gentoo clearly don't deserve that.
Pardon my french, but this looks like the same old crap to me. When are they getting with the times and making a decent graphical installer? I want to be able to mouse around and use nice partitioning tools like Diskdrake.
I'm not asking for a mandated GUI installer, just an optional one that ships with the CD. Mandrake has been doing it this way for years.
And yes, I have done headless installs. 2 of my servers are nearly purely ssh beasts with no keyboards or monitors attached, thank you. No cdroms in either one.
Whatever, the version number ain't nothin' but a number. The only thing that matters is that it increases for every release. Of course, the easiest thing would be to just skip the minor number and increment the major number for every release.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
That's the sort of dangerous mentality that the open source community needs to get away from. If accepting too many defaults gets you into a mess, it will never be acceptable to the vast majority of users.
I count myself amongst that 'vast majority' in a lot of ways. I gladly use Linux on my servers, but find other platforms more suitable for my desktop machines; they're simple and I'm happy to blame the OS for my poor choices. The free alternatives punish me for a moment's carelessness, and I sometimes slip into the mood expected by the platform and community: I accept responsibility for using a computer when I'm tired and thank it for its inconsideration in doing exactly what I told it to do. I convince myself that I'm glad to be using such a powerful, direct system. That is the mantra, isn't it?
It's just an example to show by comparison the severity of the problem.
In other words, you made it up. Please try the installer yourself before commenting further; I have, and the common case *is* streamlined.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Windows XP's installer isn't graphical, either. It installs everything
in a curses-like interface, then reboots into graphical to *configure*.