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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.

3 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. I like the debian installer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The only system out of about a dozen (including about 2/3 headless systems, with no monitor) that I've installed Debian, the only one that didn't work was VirtualPC-with-over-500MB-of-Ram.

    All the other architectures I tried (Suns, _old_ x86s, _new_ x86s) worked great.

    I really reall really like the fact that the minimal install and the installer itself doesn't require the X-windows bloat.

  2. What? by northcat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So now, is HURD so unimportant to slashdot that news related to it is just grouped under some other news? The same slashdot that carries a front page story about even release candidates of the Linux kernel?

  3. Not bad, but... by Mock · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The new installer is not too bad, but once again it goes for far too much complexity and ambiguity.

    An example:

    For the X Window System graphical user interface to operate correctly, it is necessary to select a video card driver for the X server.

    Drivers are typically named for the video card or chipset manufacturer, or for a specific model or family of chipsets.

    Select the desired X server driver.

    siliconmotion
    sis
    tdfx
    tgz
    trident
    tseng
    v esa


    Here we have the typical video driver selection screen. Can you seriously expect anyone who wasn't weaned with a transistorized soother to understand this screen?

    Who but the eternal geek will know that VESA is only used for ancient systems or vmware, or that trident means the old, ancient trident chipset, and probably not the one that could show up in their laptop? - actually I don't even know myself on this one. I'd just have to try a bunch of installs to see, something a user should not have to do.

    A little description beside each cryptic 4-5 letter identifier would be EXTREMELY helpful here.
    Better yet would be some kind of auto-detection mechanism for the most common modern cards like other distros do.

    Debian is not the only offender in this category.

    Here's my favorite:

    Please choose a method for selecting your monitor characteristics:

    Simple
    Medium
    Advanced


    This is priceless.
    What the hell is Simple, or Medium, or Advanced? Who's going to know what method will get their windowing environment working properly? (and really, that's all the user wants anyway)

    Debian seriously needs a real user-interface designer to do their installer. So long as it's done by geeks, it will continue to be useable only by geeks. The folks at debian are assuming too much arcane knowledge upon their users, and because of that, they will continue to alienate the majority of users right from the outset.