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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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
Debian maintains a list of cd-vendors. Probably far from complete, but better than nothing.
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.
- gcc 3.4 with incompatible abi on some arches
- amd64 inclusion / multi-arch
- removal of gfdl-licensed documents and other controversial non-free stuff
anything more?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.
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
...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 thought Woody still uses 2.2 kernel? Doesn't a jump to another kernel series merit a major version upgrade?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the new one just looks identical to the old one. It can have a GUI thrown over the top, though, by anyone. Debian just hasn't done it because it's low priority and most Debianites are of the opinion that it's perfect as it is (I agree).
The new features are hardware detection, auto-partitioning, and hooks for a gui. Some people have worked on one... not sure what links to give you because I don't personally care.
I'm with the crowd that thinks graphical installers are ridiculous: they have higher hardware requirements, increase the chance of "killer" errors by several hundred percent, and they change nothing except appearances and the input device. Instead hitting the down arrow a few times and then Enter, you move a pointer down with your mouse and click Yes. All the same questions have to be asked, in the same order. The practical implications are so overwhelming compared to the aesthetic ones that it's just no contest, in my mind. For example, no graphical front-end to the installer will work on all 11 architectures that Debian could be installed on. Just expensive eye candy...
people.debian.org/~taggart/multiarch
They have a plan, at least.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
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 ----
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.
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. --
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?
How about a version of dd for Windows? There appears to be a standalone version here (including some usage examples), or you can install Cygwin.
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
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!
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*.