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Interview with Debian Project Leader

Posted by michael on from the do-you-hurd-what-i-hurd dept.

brunotorres writes "I've interviewed Martin Michlmayr, Debian project leader. In this interview we talked about the upcoming Debian release, Sarge. An excerpt: 'We heard for years that Debian is hard to install and the old installer wasn't very easy to maintain or advance, so we we decided to throw the installer away and start from scratch. The new installer is much more modular, which makes it easier to maintain and extend.'" Reader ron_ivi points out that new Debian/Hurd CDs are available. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Ubuntu Linux is based on Dabian.. by Uptown+Joe · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ They will mail (snail) you 10 copies for free... The installer is nice and the desktop looks pretty damn good... Uptown (not an Ubuntu salesman) Joe

  2. Re:Heh, choice quote, taken out of context, I'm su by RealAlaskan · · Score: 4, Informative
    The quote, in context:
    NF: [interviewer] What are the most important features of the new installer?

    MM: [interviewee] We heard for years that Debian is hard to install and the old installer wasn't very easy to maintain or advance, so we we decided to throw the installer away and start from scratch. The new installer is much more modular, which makes it easier to maintain and extend. From the user's point of view, the new installer is much easier to use. It asks fewer questions than the old one, does automatic hardware detection, and has several other new features, such as automatic detection of other operating system on your machine. It also supports RAID and LVM.

    --
    See what I've been reading.
  3. Re:Wait wait wait.... by kneeless · · Score: 5, Informative
    Unless you can do source on the fly
    apt-get source gnuchess --compile
    --
    Bran muffins and whiskey.
  4. Re:Ubuntu Linux is based on Dabian.. by northcat · · Score: 3, Informative

    IIRC, ubuntu uses the new debian-installer.

  5. Re:Why does every distribution need to reinvent wh by northcat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Taking what you are saying a step further, why can't we just have a single distro? No we can't. The different free distros cater for different needs. Gentoo is for putting together a distro from the source. Debian is a distro with virtually all the apps out there and with a lot of ways to install the packages and supports many architectures. Fedora is for new users and people who want the latest eye candy apps. The commercial distros like SuSE and Mandrake *can* be unified but they're just in it for the money and they wont do it. Try convincing them.

    Now, why can't we have a single package management system/installation system? Same reasoning - different distros do different things. You can't have a single package management system for both pre-compiled and source code distros without putting extra overhead on one of them. Same thing goes for installation system. And commercial distros just won't do it. Again, try convincing them.

  6. And even in that case... by phorm · · Score: 4, Informative

    (after you've chosen a boot often such as "vanilla" or "bf24" and then selected a language)

    ALT+F2
    cat /proc/pci

    voila! Hardware devices (well, PCI/AGP anyhow).