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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.
Yes, it looks like documents are new and improved. http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
In short words: At least - with the bits taken from RHs Anaconda the installer ist "just more fun". Sarge looks very promising, but lets hope the next release will not take 5 years and more again. GO Debian!
http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/
Because I love all of you.
Grab a copy and give it a shot!
I've downloaded a copy, burned it on a CD and gave it a few shots.
This is the result.
It's not based on Progeny Anaconda. It has been written from scratch.
Some screenshots are available at http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/
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.
No it is not based on anaconda.
Screenshots
IIRC the author of the GTK installer lost much of the interest in it, because the framework wouldn't allow him to make a true graphical interface over the Debian installer.
Instead, all he could do was mapping every widget to its GTK counterpart, which then would make not much difference from the text-based installer. This way it is not possible to include, for example, a GTK partitioner app really integrated to the framework.
I think many people was looking forward for the graphical installer...
I've used the nightly builds (>beta4) about 6 times for installations on seperate occations within the last 2 weeks. Everything works much better than previous versions. No problems when it tried to probe my DHCP internet account. I'm now back at school where my pppoe which isn't DHCP based and obviously it failed detection.
Thankfully the pppoeconf package is unpacked before the initial reboot and is available after the bootstrap. Ran pppoeconf and got my connection. Still, though, I had to do this via virtual console. For the first-time debian user, they may not know pppoeconf as the name to get around this and will be stuck unable to do any sort of net-install.
my blog
Well I'm looking forward to seeing this go stable, my experiences with the beta installers were quite good. Really clears out one of the last stereotypical complaints against Debian and all ("installer is an ancient piece of cruft", which really, part of it was.) I'm more of a slackware user these days, but I often list Debian as the "other" distro that I like. But once sarge gets stable, I might just give it another go. Maybe, I might even go ahead an buy a cd set, since on dialup, downloading packages and such can be rather a pain. Anyone have any suggestions of the best place to get debian cds from?
new installer has a 'working' hardware detection (thanks to progeny at this point) and extreme modularity. I think grafical interface will come from http://www.userlinux.com/userlinux
The resulting system.
Knoppix is stripped-down.
Looking at the screenshots I miss one thing compared to YaST from SuSE: On the left side YaST has a pane with lots of help text for every dialog. The really big advantage is that it's very helpful for newbies or people who never have bothered about that part of a setup but at the same time doesn't get into the way of experienced users. Just perfect! Documentation whenever you want it and streamlined installation for the know-it-alls.
I nonetheless are very eager to try the new installer.
Hey, the main problem I had with woody was that I never got X to install. Did they get that fixed?
Kind of looks like the slackware installer to me.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
And if you want the non-i386 archs it's probably a couple more. Here's the rest of the i386 set:
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 2 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 3 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 4 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 5 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 6 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 7 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 8 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 9 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 10 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 11 of 12.
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 12 of 12.
I'm sort of new to this linux thing, but there's this directory on my new install of Debian 3.1 called "/usr/bin". It was all messed up when I first went in there. None of the files had descriptive names, and it took me like an hour to figure out they were executables, since none of them had .exe on the end of them. Furthermore, whenever I double click them, they just pop up a command prompt for a few seconds then go away.
I was gonna delete them, but I got kinda afraid that they might be my kernel, so I fiugred I'd ask. It's ok to delete this stuff, right?
Let's not forget that one can hate his government, but love his country.
The new Debian installer has automatic hardware detection, an improved partitioner (automatic "wipe the drive and do it for me", or manual with options like non-destructive resizing), and as of several months ago, gets you an installed Debian system in 11 keystrokes, 10 of which are Enter. It's also incredibly modular (based on installing miniature Debian packages), making it far easier to maintain and to extend.
Anyone know which discs are needed for what installation you might want? I would assume that a few of those are for different platforms, or maybe include all the source packages. But I am just a normal i386 user who doesn't have any need for source packages, and also don't really feel like downloading 4-6GB worth of data to figure out which. Any information on which discs to obtain would be great.
I've done four installs with a just-slightly-pre-RC1 netinst snapshot, and in all cases the installer produced a working system with a functional KDE desktop (yes, working X out of the box).
The X settings were pretty conservative, but they were functional.
This was such a shock to me that I really believed I'd burned too much karma and was likely to be hit by a bus on the way home.
I can actually recommend using the native installer instead of Knoppix to do a Debian install now.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
I really don't care about graphical setups. Fedora (IMVHO) does a good job of making a GUI setup. Debian on the other hand (again IMVHO) fills what otherwise would be a gap between something overly for-the-average-user (Mandrake/Fedora/maybe SuSe) and something for the control-freak (My beloved Slackware), and the installer portrays that fact..
Anyone who still thinks that Debian is hard to install, please think again
A big up to Debian developers everywhere!
Co-operation beats competition
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
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.
Oh please, modern my ass!
That installer can't even set up DSL that uses PPPoE.
PPPoE is only used by all the baby bells you know the largest DSL providers in America and it's also used by major providers in Canada and EU, but the Debian developers said ti was too niche to bother to support so now when you install you gotta spend an hour screwing around tyring to fix PPPoE which is a pain in the aass if you got no internet to read howtos and fine manuals.
I now debian prides itself on being a 90s throwback but you really need to be able to support DSL out of the box...
It also gives install options like LVM and raid (finally)!
However, it's still not all that impressive looking, still the same white text on blue that's been the same since I first used debian some 7 years ago. It's not bad, it's just not all that exciting.
...for the upcoming release (and mostly for the new installer), I have observed that a few of the Debian developpers have been less than responsive to major bug reports (like, big common average things not detected automagically as it is with other distros). This, with the fact that Joey Hess quit as release manager just recently, i.e. at a critical stage of the Sarge release, has me starting to wonder about Debian's future.
Has Debian hit the ceiling in terms of what a volunteer org. can acheive? I mean, are projects of this size be developped and delivered successfully by orgs such as Debian?
It took *forever* for Sarge to come out and my impression (I hope I am wrong) is that the installer will compare negatively with other distros installers. This and other config/post-install details that are bad in my mind make me truly wonder if Debian can continue in its current shape.
Is it because of the incessant splitting of hairs on "political" issues or what, I don't know. But to push Joey Hess to quit, something bad must be happening at the core of Debian.
Maybe I'm overly pessimistic because I'm transposing my personal non-tech feelings on everything today (I am in the doghouse with the girl-friend, long story), but the bad vibes I got when learning of the resignation of the Debian Sarge release coordinator do pre-dates my current predicament.
I wonder if Joey Hess did say anything (interview, somewhere?) about all of this. Joey, if you are reading this, can you comment with some insider's perspective?
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.
There's no need to use suprnova. You can get the .torrent files from the
offical site
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.
I've started using Debian about a year ago (or even longer ago) and from what I can remember I've never used an other installer for Debian than the one I see in the screenshots posted in this thread.
Have I just been using the beta version of the installer all along or is this install just a minor version update over the previous installer?
I thought Woody still uses 2.2 kernel? Doesn't a jump to another kernel series merit a major version upgrade?
Then it gets more and more weird until you realize it's a quite funny joke.
What made it work was the lead up. I guess Seinfeld et al could do better, but the point is that you have to think through the path that the readers/users will think when reading the joke. (I've read that artists think the same way when {composing, writing, painting}).
My point is that software and documentation is usually better when you've thought through the way the user thinks will be thinking and accessing it. But (if it's not a joke) you need to put those assumptions at the top of what you write.
Sorry for this irrelevant rant -- which probably is too obvious for people other than me -- but this is something I've been thinking about for a while. (-: And if some of you guys (names withheld) read this and grokks, I've made the world a better place for all of us! :-)
On topic, I installed with a Beta a month or two ago and it worked well (except for not setting the partition type when it formatted partitions(!) which made grub confused, which confused me. -- yes, I reported the bug).
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
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!
Knoppix is a stripped-down Debian.
Okay, I'll bite.
I couldn't use any of the games...immediately took the disk out, rebooted, and did some real work in Windows.
Hee.
toresbe
The way it has been explained to me, there is a damn good reason that Debian still uses an ncurses installer. Basically becuase it supports so many architectures (a good thing) with so much diff hardware, the ncurses installer is the best interafce to make sure a single installer can support each and every supported architecture. I think broader support for a good distro like Debian is much more important that a true GUI installer. Besides, I find the Debian installer to be the easiest to use, even though maybe its not the prettiest, but thats just my opinion of course.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
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.
Mandrake still embraces both styles, you can use a text-based installer with prompts like the old school Redhat installer if you want, it's a commandline switch at boot time. Best of both worlds, or a work around for wacky video hardware.
No gap here.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Next you are going to tell me the Gentoo installation is easier than Debian huh? Oh and its faster too. Right... I don't think even a skilled user needs to have or even most packages custom compiled. I usually use binaries for everything that I don't need anything out of the ordinary for (I like having my own LAMP packages, etc) Yes Gentoo is good, and I like it, but it is very much for the hobbyist and I feel is really only "fun" the first time around
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
mmm but xconfig is so tasty now. I haven't tried the gtk version but the qt version is quite sweet, I installed x and kde on my last machine before building my 2.6 kernel, just so I could use it. (not I would normally install kde anyhow, just usually after I built the kernel)
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
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.
well, let's see...never.
Debian, unlike most distros, supports 11 architectures _with_a_single_installer_. That means installing over the biggest variety of hardware of any Linux distro. That means supporting installing with a serial terminal, among just one obvious piece of hardware which doesn't support graphical.
Plus graphical != user-friendly. The sarge installer has been user-friendly for several betas now, even though it's a curses user interface, not a graphical one.
I can get linux up and running from a stage 3 gentoo install much faster than I can with Debian. Any why wouldn't you custom compile all you packages? Isn't that a big part of linux -- being able to customize everything?
All it should do is just work and detect as much hardware as possible automagically.
There are many alternative ways to install Debian, if the default one doesn't suit your needs. Debian needs an installer that is flexible, powerful and portable in order to be usable by all the diverse users of Debian, not to mention the dozen or so different architectures Debian runs on.
Of course, the Debian developers could have delayed the next release a year or so in order to get a pretty graphical installer working on some platforms. I guess their priorities are different.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Joey Hess has written up a
retrospective on the new installer. It's a good read.
Be careful what you wish for. The best Windows installer IMHO was the one for NT. After that they started trying to detect too many devices that would hang the whole process.
I think the original plan for this Debian release was for a graphical installer, but to be honest I'd rather have one that JUST WORKS, producing a bootable system that can be tinkered with to deal with anything that's not perfect. The new installer, from my experience has improved the detection of devices, reduced the number of questions asked of the user. Once all these things are perfected (or nearly so) I suppose making it graphical will be a nice way to, um, slow down the whole process like Windows does. I can live without it.
Unlike Windows, the Linux install process is not a monthly maintenance task, so I hardly think it matters how it looks.
They're both curses based, but in what way do pretty graphics make inte easier to install an OS?
They make people more comfortable, and comfortable users have a greater ability to figure things out. I think having a graphical *option* is important if one wants to bring Linux to the masses. Of course, I am not really sure that this is in Debian's list of goals, so this may not be so important.
OTOH, the last two times I have installed Fedora (Core 2), I have had to fall back to the text-based installer because it is more stable than the X-based one. Probably for reasons of memory consumption....
Also text-based installers are important for another reason-- they allow you to install Linux on specialized network appliances which may not have the hardware for a graphical installation. For example, I run a highly customized Red Hat 9 on my firewall, which has 32MB RAM, and a VGA video card. Works great.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Have you ever done a headless install? No? I didn't think so. Not every system has a video card, monitor and keyboard attached so a graphical installer would be a huge pain in the ass.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Be sure to send that link on to congress..
12 disks.. damn..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
[nt]
I want to gunzip the boot.img.gz directly onto my usb drive and then boot from that. As per the instructions at: http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apb.ht ml
But how the hell do i get the boot.img.gz onto the usb drive? I could do it if I was already running linux apparently, but I'm not. Any ideas? I can gunzip it fine, but I need to write it directly to the usb drive. From what I can find, there's no program which can currently do that in windows. Th e catch 22 is that i would need linux first to do it. If anyone can please,please help tell me how to write the .img to a usb drive using windows then please please do! That's currently the only thing stopping me using linux.
Nope, its still console based ( i asked this last time this came up around here.. )
But, if you are running a i386, you can goto progeny.com and get a sarge+anaconda installer set..
That said, the 'new' debian installer isnt bad for someone that knows what they are doing, the main target for stock Debian anyway...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The new installer can get debian installed in 11 keystrokes -- 10 of which are 'Enter'.
I'm glad to have both Debian and Gentoo.
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.
My understanding is that the graphical front-end is more or less abandoned. I tried building it from source without any luck a few months back. It would be nice to see someone hack up a working installer using the GTK udebs, even if it's simply a gtk version of the current menus.
Anyone know if this installer supports the ARM architecture?
I want to use Debian, but not on x86.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I just spent the better part of Friday night and yesterday reading, downloading and installing debian "Woody" via jigdo-lite. Damn, back to the drawing board.
{{throws hand in the air}}
I don't have a 128MB usb drive... But this is what I would try..
.gz file seems to have an bootable filesystem image. Extract it using wizip, winrar or gzip/gunzip. Get the rawrite2 utility and use it to put it on the USB drive using the USB drives letter. Download the "Debian netinst CD image" (as stated on the page you linked to) and copy it to the now correctly formated USB drive........ Profit!?... :) ... Please post success/failiure reports.. :D
The
Disclaimer: these are just suggestions and I haven't tried it mywelf! If you damage your hardware.... then you must have done something pretty wild..
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
non-destructive resizing
Note, however, that this resizing does not work with NTFS, so you can't use it to split the hard drive on any computer sold in the last 3 years or so.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I'm tired of all the "I don't want to compile everything" gentoo trolls. Gentoo now has binary packages for quick installs. I personally love the customization, but there are other options.
Jay | http://oldos.org
In 2005 the software in Sarge will be as old as Woody is now. (Think Gnome 1.3.)
I don't understand why anyone believes this is a meaningful complaint. I know plenty of people still using Windows 95 and 98 on desktop systems, and I've installed Debian Woody on plenty of desktop systems. My desktop machine tracks unstable only because I need it for development. For the end-user, do you honestly think they want to install a new version of their OS every six months (or download 100+ MB of updates every month and sort out the problems those updates cause?)
The vast majority of computer users do not want to live on the bleeding edge. Your grandma does not know how to pick the optimal compiler flags. She doesn't know how to resolve errors with dpkg or rpm. Why force this nonsense on her?
What ignorance! The Debian Installer was built from the ground up, designed to be modular so that people could add a GUI later. No-one from Debian has suggested that the new DI would actually have a GUI this time around. Instead they have worked on hardware detection and a decent installation. The idea was because Debian is installed on 11 architectures that a GUI installer might not work on all arches. A GUI one can be made for i386 later.
BTW, Windows XP still has a crappy text-based partitioner and installer. So why do people give Debian a hard time?
I always get my *nix CDs from ebay, it's much cheaper than the official sets, and there are loads of people who burn in bulk and sell cheap.
Windows is only $500 if your time is worthless.
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?
When are they getting with the times and making a decent graphical installer?
From http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ :
I succeded in transfering the filesystem to the USB drive from windows but my comp seems to be unwilling to boot from the USB device. Try what I did and maybe your comp will react better.
:)
This is what I did...
1 Get the dd utility from here. Unzip it and put it into your c:\winnt directory (unless you want to mess with env. variables [PATH]).
2. Get the boot.img.gz image from here. For some unexplainable reason Windows unpacked it for me to its real size (ca 123 Mb). Maybe because I have winrar installed? Maybe not. Winrar should be able to unpack it anyway.
3. Get the bootbf2_4-xfs_iso.zip and read this to be able to unpack it. I like this ISO because it the kernel has XFS support. Choose any other you prefer.
4. Start a cmd.exe and use "dd --list" to see your devices so that dd can use them. (dd is used to copy raw data). My usb device was I: and in the listin I could read:
\\.\Volume{45e7b0b0-e981-11d8-be69-00a0c9ca4794}\
Mounted on i:\
5. After finding your USB device in the list dd the boot.img to the device:
dd boot.img.gz \\.\Volume{45e7b0b0-e981-11d8-be69-00a0c9ca4794}\
6. If that worked copy the unpacked bootbf2.4-xfs.iso file to your USBs root directory.
7. Reboot the comp and enter the BIOS setup. Set it to boot from your USB (or USB-ZIP) device.
The filesystem on my friends USB drive is fine and I can mount it from windows and Linux. The filesystem si 128Mb big and the device is 256 so it seemd to have worked fine (since the iso was supposed to have a 128Mb fs). I have one comp that is supposed to be bootable from USB but the USB device (mp3-player) itself seems to not react untill the OS is up. maybe that's why it won't boot? I hope. Hope you have better luck!..
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
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.
:) ) Do you really think that was the installer's fault?
The problem was that I then ran a bunch of site customization scripts that I wrote, and one of them installed a piece of software that caused all X programs to segfault because of hardware incompatibilities. (non-nvidia cards don't like nvidia drivers, imagine that!
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I didn't get errors either.. But my comps are too old for this fancy-shmancy USB stuff I guess.. ;) .. Go to bed? Oh you're in europe too.. :)
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Ah, so the screenshots arenot merely worthless because they look just like the old one and so dont show any of the things which have changed, but they are also worthless because even if they did show a change, it wouldnt matter anyway. Thanks for clearing that up.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
ADSL ???
If SLIP was good enough for your dad, then it's good enough for you !
To stay on topic though, I realy really really liked the "copy data from this partition" feature in the partition tool in the new installer. It was realllly useful to reorg my disks prior to a fresh install.
Of course since I was installing sid on an AMD64, it rather went downhill from there...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
How else would you define taking away all the surplus/extraneous stuff from a distribution?
It's been stripped down to one bootable CD, even if this CD is full of heavily compressed data.
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 ...
A fair number of the screenshots are also screenshots of progress bars, which are noninteractive
I realize this, and all of these points were implicit in my post. However, this is still a catastrophe. The fact remains that users with certain configurations must navigate a huge number of screens in order to complete the installation. Extremely few users preconfigure unattended installations. But let's consider that the average number of interactive prompts is 50. That is still far too many.
let's consider that the average number of interactive prompts is 50.
Where did you get this figure?
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I don't need a GUI installer, but I DO want an installer that can actually detect my hardware. Every other distro has done that since the 90's!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It's just an example to show by comparison the severity of the problem. In other words, even if the average number of prompts is less than 25% of the maximum number of possible prompts (a relatively small proportion), it's still way too much--regardless of the nature of the required input. I'd like to say more about it, but I'll reserve comment until after I've tried the final build for myself.
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!
i am a debian user (four boxes, desktop is sid, NAT/gateway is woody, ramsey fm10 yardcasting sound source is sarge and my xbox dual boots to woody) and installing was never a huge problem. i'd like to see some nice tools that do hardware detection and interact when you want to roll your own kernel from source rather than an eye candy GUI installer. but that's just the lazy me. and i'm annoyed by the qt powered xconfig that kernel 2.6.x brings forth, i liked the old tcl deally. o well, progress i spose.
i don't do update/upgrades till late Sunday evening on my sid box. so far so good.Serenity now, insanity later.
50 is a little high. The new installer's minimum is 10 hits of the enter key and one tab key (to select yes I want to format my drive)
Now if you want more controll over your install you can select non-default settings and probably get 100 or more. I don't think you could ever do 1 install and get all 212 screens because if you use dhcp then you don't get the network setup promts but if you don't use dhcp then you are never promted for it.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
To add to the parent:
In contrast, those wanting to use Debian on a desktop and use the bleeding edge stuff can do that too, using Sid (unstable).
What Debian calls "stable" more accurately should be called "static", because the Debian folk assure non-breakage and long-term stability by literally not allowing anything to change (except security fixes). To Debian, "unstable" is called unstable merely because it is constantly changing. However, "changing" doesn't always imply "broken", or even "constantly breaking", since Debian's package system and the QA makes updating stuff moderately painless for most folks, and the possibily of major problems only occur with a small number of critical packages (which for the most part are managed by the smartest and most responsible of the Debian folk).
Hundreds, probably thousands, of others, myself included, routinely update their systems against Debian's "unstable" tree on a monthly, weekly, or even daily(!) basis, in order to get the latest stuff, and a large majority do so without problems. I myself have had one major breakage and maybe 2 or 3 dozen small breakages in the last ~2.5 years, while updating 2 to 3 times per week to Sid. With almost all of these problems, the solution was simply to put the broken packages on hold in aptitude, wait a few days for the packages to be fixed, and uploaded to Debian, then install/reinstall/upgrade them. No sweat on my part, the Debian Developers do all the work for me (thanks guys). For something really important, you can revert to the old version immediately if you really need that package to continue working, but since we are talking about desktop systems, this shouldn't be as much of an issue as it is with servers.
To be fair, that one major breakage, involving glibc, was fairly nasty, but frankly, a) I don't see it as all that different with other distros that are regularly (more than once every 3 months) updating their systems (Debian Sid is being upgraded continously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and b) when you want to live on the bleeding edge, you have to be willing to pay the price, and the occasional minor problem, and the relatively rare major problem is the price that must be payed.
I've seen the complaints about "unstable", but you have to keep in mind the sheer number of people using Debian, the fact they are using it for different reasons and purposes, and are therefore using different packages or different combinations of packages that may create problems, but only for the people who have the exact same combination, and the fact that since unstable is in a constant state of flux, it might get broken for an hour or two, or four, until the DD (or someone else) hears about the problem and uploads a fix, which means a few unlucky people have some pain (maybe a lot of pain), but the majority of users who upgrade later never see that problem.
My suggestions:
Be sure to file your installation reports here:e port-template
http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/r
my blog
While Debian is my favorite distro and I run testing as my primary desktop, my one problem with it has always been setting up ALSA drivers. On the current setup I have now, I just stuck with the OSS drivers, setting up ALSA was too much of a pain in the a$$. anyone know if the stable release of sarge will include better alsa-driver compatability?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Windows XP's installer isn't graphical, either. It installs everything
in a curses-like interface, then reboots into graphical to *configure*.
By definition for 95%+ of users if supporting multiple architectures means something as fundamental as a graphical installer is lacking, then extreme multi-arch support is not a good thing.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I tried it, and it is awesome, pretty much like a knoppix install, no hardware questions, everything except reiserfs worked out of the box (reiserfs refused to mount but I had a problem in my machine) and the install went smooth with a net install after the first machine. Partitioning about 3 times enter, that is it.