Interview with Debian Project Leader

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.

Comments

Heh, choice quote, taken out of context, I'm sure

[grasshoppa]

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.

heh, so if I'm reading this right, they know the old installer is hard to use, but they really don't care. The new one is easier to extend and maintain, and that's all that's important. :)

Wait wait wait....

[JoeLinux]

I've always thought there should be two versions of linux: bleeding edge, and ignorant housewife editions.

Red Hate falls squarely into the ignorant housewife category, where gentoo and LFS are for linux users with balls of steel.

Unless you can do source on the fly, I don't see the gentoo-type crowd getting excited over this.

Just my $.02 (that's $4.00 canadian)

Re:Wait wait wait....

[odyrithm]

No I'm sorry but running a few scripts(gentoo) does NOT make your a user with "balls of steel". Vanilla LFS maybe, but even that is step by step instructions pretty much.

If you want to have fun try putting HURD together with GNU, useless but something a user with "balls of steel" would do, or far to much time on there hands :P

And what the heck do you mean by "source on the fly"???? to me that says vm language(scripted).. but I'm guessing you ment something clever.

Re:Wait wait wait....

[kneeless]

Unless you can do source on the fly

apt-get source gnuchess --compile

Re:Wait wait wait....

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I've always thought there should be two versions of linux: bleeding edge, and ignorant housewife editions.

There's a third: A powerful version that is stable. I need to spend my time using Linux to do things for my job, I don't like to spend time debugging the OS.

Re:Wait wait wait....

[northcat]

The current debian release (woody) works ABSOLUTELY finely for me. Its very stable. Of course, I can't boast to others about having the latest version of GEyeCandy but I really don't give a shit. If I want the latest version of a particular program I can upgrade it independently (and there are backports from sarge of several important programs available for woody. so you can't complain about X not working). No one is going to need the latest versions of EVERY fucking package in their distro. But in case you do, you can use testing. Its pretty stable. At least it's as stable as all those distros out there whose version numbers cannot be stored in a 32-bit ints.

Re:Wait wait wait....

[dn15]

There's a third: A powerful version that is stable. I need to spend my time using Linux to do things for my job, I don't like to spend time debugging the OS.

This is why I love Debian as a server. I could test and install software myself if I had to, but why? The last thing I want to do is spend endless hours figuring out which versions of which software I can use to maintain security without breaking compatibility with my existing data or config files. Life's too short to mess with a server that isn't guaranteed to "just work."

Ubuntu Linux is based on Dabian..

[Uptown Joe]

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

I like the debian installer.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Missing Question:

[ypoint]

Is Your Development Project a Sinking Ship?

What?

[northcat]

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?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

When has HURD ever been important to _anyone_ except HURD developers?

Re:What?

[MemoryDragon]

Sorry to rant here, but hurd is a nice ongoing research project doomed to fail in the long run.... The reasons, to few developers, not to much interest by the people who initiated the project in the first run as it seems, almost no moving forward, critical things after 10 years not implemented (a decent filesystem etc...) hurd is a nice concept with a partial implementation after 10 years, the time it will reach the finally usable status, Stallman and others will have died of age.

Re:What?

[hayden]

So now, is HURD so unimportant to slashdot that news related to it is just grouped under some other news?

Yes.

Hurd CDs

[jdowland]

I'm looking forward to a Hurd LiveCD - I understand this is technically pretty complex but when it happens, trying out hurd will be simplified massively.

Re:Heh, choice quote, taken out of context, I'm su

[RealAlaskan]

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.

Damn installer

[Tsiangkun]

The only time it gave me headaches was when I banged my head on the desk trying to seewhat type of chipset my ethernet card had, and what type of graphics card was inside the box.

As long as you know what type of hardware you have, debian is simple to install, and very easy to keep updated. I think most people just don't like to read the text on screen detailing exactly what's going on during the install.

Why Debian over Gentoo?

[bonch]

Well, I wondered the same thing until I tried out Debian and realized you could do interesting things like downgrade packages to previous versions. In general, the install system had features Portage doesn't, until the next version of Portage anyway.

That didn't stop me from happily moving to FreeBSD, however. :)

Re:Why Debian over Gentoo?

[neiras]

Uh oh! Someone didn't do their homework!

Gentoo has always allowed you to downgrade packages to any previous version. The revdep-rebuild script will even attempt to fix any broken dynamic linkage that might result.

emerge =packagename-old.version && revdep-rebuild

will do the trick, and then you'll need to edit

/etc/portage/package.mask

to mask versions newer than the old one you installed.

I bet you're having fun with BSD if you missed such an obvious feature of Portage :D

Re:Why Debian over Gentoo?

[molnarcs]

Well, I don't think so. I had the opportunity to play with gentoo for two months (see this post and this was my experience with it:

To get a usable system, we had to hunt for the description of various use-flags, and some of those descriptions were not exactly helpful: MOTIF= this will install motif on your sytem - well, thank you very much. Had to recompile kdebase to get plugin support for konqi. I was frustrated, while others on gentooforums, after learning that they have to recompile just as we did, began to praise the power of use-flags (I still don't understand how?).

Anyway, seeing that there were 300+ use-flags, and you have to remember at least a few dozen of them and their relationship and effect on your installed packages, I realized that gentoo was not (this was in april-may last year) that different from slackware without swaret. In slack, you had to remember package dependencies, but since repos grouped packages logically, this wasn't that difficult or daunting (nor was it in gentoo), but I still felt that what was referred as dependency-hell is simply exhanged in gentoo with what we may call a use-flag hell. Basically this was the result of portage (or ebuild) maintainers' unwillingness to come up with defaults (read: configure portage for you to the best of their abilities) that would suit 90% of the users (most users want a combination of most functionality + leanest packages). Don't tell me its not possible, because it is, they just don't do it. Moreover (and this bothers me a bit) they advertise this (forcing the user to memorize and spend days configuring use-flags) as a feature.

In a binary distribution, I'd end up with a couple hundred megs worth of QT and KDE anyway, but with Gentoo I can USE="-qt -kde" and eliminate it entirely.

Explain. I don't really understand how the first part of your sentence relates to the second. (I think that if I want debian, or ubuntu or [insert distro here] to be kde-free, I can do it, without use-flags. Hell, I can do it in freebsd, which doesn't have useflags - thankfully, progs present you with an ncurses based options screen if there are multiple build-knobs, so there is no need to learn a list of use-flags or tweak configuration files for days just to get package management working)

Re:Why Debian over Gentoo?

[Dwonis]

The quick way to install a particular version of a package is to run:

apt-get install wmbiff=0.3.8-3

Of course, the package will be upgraded next time you do an upgrade, so to stop that, you can "hold" the package:

echo 'wmbiff hold' | dpkg --set-selections

To undo that, you'd run:

echo 'wmbiff install' | dpkg --set-selections

Of course, fullscreen package management utilities like aptitude and Synaptic let you do the above with fewer keystrokes.

Alternatively, you can put something like the following into /etc/apt/preferences (see man apt_preferences for more details):

Package: wmbiff
Pin: version 0.3.8
Pin-Priority: 501

Hope that helps.

Re:Heh, choice quote, taken out of context, I'm su

[MikeMacK]

which makes it easier to maintain and extend.

Wouldn't Viagra accomplish the same thing.

Clever Martin

[RealAlaskan]

From TFA:

NF: [interviewer] When will we be able to celebrate Sarge's release?

MM: [interviewee] There's currently no date for the release. There are a number of show-stoppers related to our infrastructure which we have to sort out before we can make a release. We hope Sarge will come out near the beginning of the year.

Clever Martin! He doesn't say which year.

Sarge is great. When it becomes the new Stable, I may just switch from Testing to Stable.

Why does every distribution need to reinvent wheel

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does each and every distribution need to reinvent the installer and the package management tools and the portage system and the system layout?

Can't we have just one installer, one package management tool and one portage system that is shared by all the linux distributions, the bsd variants, OS X fink, windows cygwin, the comercial vendors, and all the rest?

I mean really, reinventing a new tool to do something that people have been doing for 30 years is the height of arrogance. And even if they do invent their own package management system, does it only have to run with their own custom portage system? Can we have multiple interfaces to just one portage system that works across all posix systems?

Ideally I should be able to pop in a DVD, and have a single installer come up that lets me mix and match my kernel with my package management system and select what packages I want to install and then have it install them in a known location that is the same as everyone elses in the world.

I should be able to deploy a software package one time and just have it compile and install itself on any unix like system. And work.

All you separate distributions and operating systems need to get off your high horses and share the labor for things that are common between all of you. This is why we don't have unix on every desktop right now. The fragmentation is killing adoption of unix on the desktop.

Re:Ubuntu Linux is based on Dabian..

[northcat]

IIRC, ubuntu uses the new debian-installer.

Installers, et al

[jd]

The old installer was a pain. It took me about 3 days to do one install, because of some quirk in the options I'd used. I'm no novice, when it comes to Linux installers, either. I cut my teeth on MCC Linux and SLS, the precursors to Slackware.

The problem with all installers (Fedora included) is that dependency tracking is extremely difficult and complex, and packages don't always accurately describe their dependencies. They also don't have any good way of handling multiple flavours of (essentially) the same product. They also don't talk with each other, so don't expect apt or rpm to know about anything you installed from CPAN or CPANPLUS, even though there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't have a program to rationalize the contents of different installer databases.

However, that is not the fault of Debian, but rather the fault of the problem being solved. It is extremely complex, and no good solution currently exists.

As a distribution, I like Debian a lot. No, that's not just because they included my FOLK patches as an alternative kernel (though that is a factor, because it means Debian is far more capable of including interesting ideas than almost any other distribution). Debian is simply a damn good distribution. It's comprehensive, it's consistant in approach, and it's been able to maintain a very high level of quality, despite having a very large number of contributors. (Or maybe because they do.)

There have been a lot of distributions, over the ages. Some have failed because the maintainers gave up (SLS, for example). Some failed because they appealed to too specialized an audience, so there wasn't a userbase to keep things going (QLinux is an example of that). Some failed because of political reasons (Stampede Linux got busted over a "trademark infringement" that pushed credibility a little far). Some failed because the maintainers went commercial (Red Hat Linux, I'm talking to you!).

Given that kind of turbulent history, it's impressive that Debian has done as well as it has. Those involved in the project should feel proud of themselves. IIRC, Slackware is the only other distro that has lasted as long, or atracted such a following.

Re:Installers, et al

[SanLouBlues]

Well, the new installer isn't exactly perfect yet either. I had to setup a Debian server (Debian was mandated) and I had a helluva time (operator error, but the installer was an enabler).

Here's the executive summary (just the parts that didn't go well):

First, I tried the Debian net-install because it's only a 123MB download and this was going to be the only machine that I installed it on.
I used a machine that was Mandrake because it was already partitioned and it fit the requirements, but Debian didn't like my partitions. I checked every possibility I could think of short of choosing the manual option because I don't like messing with fdisk myself. That was ok though, I didn't really need the old partitions, so I just gave up and let it do it automatically.
Next, I carelessly breezed through the GRUB install without reading carefully, so I got GRUB on my hd0 even though I had that machine set to boot hd1 instead because I was too lazy to take out an old windows drive a long time ago. That was fine, I just changed the BIOS and I planned on taking out that drive later anyways.
Now, after rebooting, I set up an apt repository since most of the stuff wasn't on the CD, chose to set it up as both a desktop and a server since I really like XWindows on my servers as an option even if it doesn't run by default.
I went and watched TV and came back a while later and saw that it said it was done, and to rerun, I could just use some command that I instantly forgot.
Well, I got the regular old console and rebooted because I knew that XWindows would be setup to run by default since I had chosen the Desktop option. It rebooted. To the console. I was not miffed, I figured it was still just a gimpy install like it was 5 years ago when I tried it. So I logged in and ran 'startx' and promptly found out that nothing was installed. After messing with aptitude for 90 minutes, I figured out that some packages on the ftp site weren't signed (or something) and wouldn't install. It recommended 'apt-get -f install' but that did nothing. I messed around with different mirrors and other crap for another 3 hours before giving up (there's no #debian channel on irc.debian.org that I can find, they're all #deb-specific and I couldn't find #deb-n00bs or its equivalent). Not to mention that at one point aptitude was selecting software we needed for uninstall for some reason.

Since the Net-Install had failed, I downloaded the isos for CDs 1 and 2 (testing). I was pissed and I didn't understand that I didn't need to at the time, so I started the install from scratch again.
Went through the same crap with the partitions (it didn't even like the partitions that it had generated before, so it auto-generated new partitions that were exactly the same). I put GRUB on the right hard drive this time (and made a mental note to get rid of the other drive later after I archived all my old mp3s).
I tried to reduce my interaction by just putting CD2 in the second CD drive, but it wasn't detected so I had to check up on the machine periodically during the install.
Eventually, this worked. I have a functional Debian system and I will never net-install again. I won't use systems that don't boot to hd0 already for Debian either. I won't just reinstall over an old Debian system instead of using my new CDs as apt repositories, and I won't mess with base-config after the install is done.

Now my only complaint is that it installed Postgres instead of MySQL. How about next time I get to choose which database my "Database Server" uses? Or at least change "Database Server" to "Postgresql Server".

Re:Why does every distribution reinvent the wheel

[flossie]

... because the old square wheels weren't good enough. And the newer triangular wheels weren't much better.

Why does it matter if the wheel is constantly re-invented? No one is forcing you to do the reinvention and you don't have to use the new wheels.

Freedom to tinker is a major part of the driving force behind free software at the moment. As for fragmentation "killing adoption of unix on the desktop" (assuming that you are including GNU/Linux with unix), there are more *nix systems on desktops now than there ever have been previously. Strength through diversity, etc.

Honesty/Disclaimer

[Smiffa2001]

"I wouldn't recommend Debian on the desktop for people who are new to Linux, but it's perfectly suited for people who have some experience with Linux or have an admin who takes care of their machine."

I like the comment, though it's probably been said a thousand times before. I would say though, that it still takes SysAdmin-type powers to be comfortable with most Linux distros, at least in my experience. Everybody that I ever came across that said "use Linux, it's great" turned out to have a decent amount of tech knowledge and (it later turned out) had climbed the sometimes steep learning curve that goes with it. I went through/still am going through that same curve and finding it immensely enjoyable and rewarding - I'm even seeing people that would benefit from using Linux but the hoops you sometimes have to go through to even get a printer to work would fox these people. If I'd let it loose on em, it'd mean constant calls every day/week.

The comment made me think about this again, thats all. We're close I reckon, but not quite there...

Re:Honesty/Disclaimer

[Techiegeeks]

Just recommend Ubuntu for people that are new to Linux. It's an easy install, a blast to use and it's Debian based. Plus they have a Live CD. So that they could test it out before installing it.

I like it because it doesn't overwhelm you with apps. And if you want to add something, just apt-get it (or better yet fire up Synaptic).

http://www.ubuntulinux.org

Re:Why does every distribution need to reinvent wh

[mccalli]

Can't we have just one installer, one package management tool and one portage system that is shared by all the linux distributions, the bsd variants, OS X fink, windows cygwin, the comercial vendors, and all the rest?

Well, Debian and OS X Fink do share an install system - apt-get. "All the Linux distributions"? Would be nice, but there are a fair few .deb-based ones out there now. RedHat and Cygwin share a system I believe (I'm prepared to be corrected here), because Cygwin was originally has ties to RedHat.

Ideally I should be able to pop in a DVD, and have a single installer come up...

Ah, well you've lost me there already you see. A DVD? I run Debian on a old laptop that hasn't got a CD drive, let alone a DVD. I also run it on a Cobalt RaQ - not even a floppy drive there. A single installer? But on my flashy new hardware I like graphical installs, whereas I would spit blood at anything requiring a graphical install if I was trying to put it onto the Cobalt.

All you separate distributions and operating systems need to get off your high horses and share the labor for things that are common between all of you.

OK. So who gets off whose horse first? I know - let's dump RPM, I always hated it. But hold on, it's used with some of the most popular and commercially supported distros right? So I know, let's dump .deb, after all it's only minority. But hang on, some of the most stable distributions there are use .deb so there must be some merit in it. I know, let's dump RPM...and repeat ad nauseam.

Cheers,
Ian

Why linux doesn't sell well...

[copponex]

Oh, you don't know anything about computers? Try our Ignorant Housewife edition. See, it's for stupid people - like you.

Re:Why linux doesn't sell well...

[0racle]

I wonder how often something called Ignorent Housewife Edition' would be downloaded?

Re:Why linux doesn't sell well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Change .iso to .avi and it'd get plenty of hits!

Re:Why linux doesn't sell well...

[Mattintosh]

Actually, I'd almost classify the Debian installer as "Ignorant Housewife edition".

Sarge-something-something-x86 and Sarge-something-something-powerpc are the ones I've downloaded so far, and I've actually had a chance to mess with the x86 one. (The old beige powermac g3 is in the process of getting its heavy ass moved into another room.) The install went something like this:
1) download iso and burn to CD
2) boot spare x86 machine from CD
3) wait
4) let it configure DHCP
4a) wonder why it didn't work, play with it a bit
4b) plug the damned ethernet cable in, repeat 4)
5) give it some network settings (domain name, machine name, etc)
7) pick some package groups to install
8) wait
9) wait
10) wait
11) give a root password, create a user
12) log in and use the damned thing

So it's not a 3-step-with-no-step-3 iMac. Whoopee. I didn't expect it to be. Then again, this is the first time I've ever used a Linux system. Ever. And I was practically spoonfed a working installation. And within a few hours of use, I was able to install/uninstall packages, mess with basic environment settings, and play a few games. That's a far cry from "not ready for the desktop."

I declare it... 2004 (I did the installation on 12/30/04) is the year of the Linux desktop. Hey, it passed my test.

Now to toss MacOS X 10.2.8 (the last release "supported" on the beige g3) out on it's ass... maybe in a few days. I need sleep.

Get your distro upgrade procedures sorted out!!

[twilight30]

One of the things I've noticed of late with Debian is that their vaulted upgrade procedure between versions is definitely not working for Woody and Sarge.

Upgrading from a fresh Woody install -- of 3.0r0, to be precise -- directly to Sarge as it now stands destroys Gnome completely. It will boot, start X11, but then die horribly for reasons I have yet to sort out fully. (I did this three weeks ago, for an old beater that was a gift) And it would die consistently only in that operating any Gnome application in tandem with another would do it.

The only way I could get the install procedure to update correctly was by using a sarge netinstall CD with a beta from August.

I believe the kernel versions changing has a lot to do with this. Of course, blaming Debian for this is not fair, but expecting users to suddenly know everything about the kernel version, the module loading/management procedure and the deep changes to the /etc directory is a little much.

I don't care about a GUI installer. I do care about Debian's stability between versions. I used to think Debian's upgrade process flawed (speed of releases) but essentially fine for those people who didn't want to think about dependency hell when using an online upgrading service. But now I am wondering if they really have it under control; I think they've taken policy as far as they can go.

They should commit to a regular timeframe for stable/server/stale versions and stick to it. Once a year is plenty of time.

Re:Get your distro upgrade procedures sorted out!!

[Dionysus]

1) Sarge hasn't been released yet, so upgraded from Woody to Sarge is not guaranteed to work *yet*
2) Gnome 2.8 was just recently moved into Sarge, so some unstability was to be expected.

You just chose a really unfortunate time to do the upgrade (when I went from Woody to Sarge, Sarge had been relatively stable for a couple of weeks, as in no major packages had been moved into Sarge for awhile)

You know you read too much slashdot ..

[ElektroHolunder]

You know you read too much slashdot when you read sentences like this:

we're aware that many people are interested in a graphical installer and certain languages like Thai might even require this

and catch yourself thinking " 'Thai'? Oh no, not another scripting language.."

Why yet another new installer?

[Eric Smith]

What's wrong with Anaconda, which already works in text and graphical modes? Hasn't it been part of Progeny's Debian-based distribution for a long time?

Though just about anything, including poking one's eyes out with a sharp stick, would be better than the old Debian installer. I've been a hardcore Unix user/developer since 1982, and Linux since 1991, and yet I was completely baffled at some of the questions the old installer asked, and at the sheer number of questions.

Re:Why yet another new installer?

[stevey]

Anaconda is good, but it isn't available on all 11 architectures which Debian intends to release against.

Far better to have one installer which works identically across each platform than Anaconda for x86, and other installers for other platforms.

Re:Why yet another new installer?

[bogie]

That is what I was going to answer because its true.Anaconda doesn't run on every arch. But why should x86 users, ie 80%+ of Debian users have to suffer without a great installer like Anaconda just so somebody using some obsure arch has the same aweful install experience(yes I know the installer has improved). Cater to your base which is x86. Let the rest get by with a lesser installer. They have till now and won't go away just because x86 as usual gets all of the goodies.

That or continue to watch as all of your users flee to distros like Ubuntu.

Refreshing interview

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to read an interview from a distro project member where the problems/limitations of the distro, (such as the long release cycle), are openly admitted. All too often distro maintainers (and users) make excuses for current limitations in their distros and stubbornly refuse to address them in a rational manner.

Re:openoffice

[MsGeek]

That's funny, because I just copied your very words into my KDE Klipper from Firefox then pasted them right into an OpenOffice document. And I'm running Debian Sarge/Sid!

Try the FUD, it's excellent today. May I suggest a full-bodied whine with that?

Nah! Who needs an installer?

[aralin]

I installed my Debian in 1996, almost nine years ago. Since then I exchanged three computers and five harddisks under it and its still running without any need to reinstall. It went smoothly through several major and minor OS updates like a charm.

As a side note, I'd really like to see someone try to do this with Windows. Upgrading from 95 to 98 to 2k to XP and replacing HDs, CPUs and MBs under that system, while not having to reinstall all your applications and redo all the settings.

Re:Why does every distribution need to reinvent wh

[Phexro]

"Can't we have just one installer, one package management tool and one portage system that is shared by all the linux distributions, the bsd variants, OS X fink, windows cygwin, the comercial vendors, and all the rest?"

No.

You must be new here.

Re:Why does every distribution need to reinvent wh

[northcat]

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.

Getting bigger?

[plasticsquirrel]

8700 packages for Debian GNU/Linux? Great. New installer? Nice. If I buy a small server, though, I can't even get a stable version that ships with SATA support. Debian may be a wonderful community project, but it is becoming too bloated to move forward like it used to.

Re:Getting bigger?

[Chandon Seldon]

This is nothing new, and not a real problem. Debian Stable has always been a step or two behind the hardware curve.

If you want to run a server on Debian you are almost assuredly capible of getting it installed and working with a custom kernel on SATA drives.

And even in that case...

[phorm]

(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).

Re:Heh, choice quote, taken out of context, I'm su

[PeterPumpkin]

heh, so if I'm reading this right, they know the old installer is hard to use

Well, indirectly, since the new installer isn't "easy". The "easy" route is picking from a list of a whopping 7 choices. Pick "Desktop Machine" if you are okay with KDE, GNOME, and several other WM's being installed, and lots of random cruft, OR you get to do "Manual Package Selection", and wade through Debian's 8000+ packages. Neither the 7-super-mega-package-selection, nor the Manual Package Selection, is an option for most sane people. The only way to do it really is just installing the base system, and proceed with a self-paced Gentoo-style bit-by-bit install using apt-get. The difference in time spent installing, for me, was statistically insignificant.

This isn't necessarily bad, some of us like putting together systems that way, but thats another story...

vga=791 & foolprofness

[mu22le]

"NF: I think there should be framebuffer options in the installation boot prompt, something like choosing resolution. I had to type linux26 vga=791. Do you plan to put resolution options in the boot menu?

MM: Debian-installer works very well in the default resolution; putting in too many options would confuse users. You should use the command line option."

As much as I love Debian this is stupid.
It took me more than a week to figure out what was wrong with my laptop when I tried Potato! (look, it was my second linux installation and the first with debian and my laptop)
This is not helping newcomers!

I also fail to see why not supporting reiser4 (ok, ok, pleas dont flame, I will compile it myself, no big deal... I just tought that, ok Ill shut up)

Number of CDs

[standsolid]

NF: How many CDs will be needed to install a complete Debian suite, including KDE/GNOME?

MM: I think most of KDE and GNOME will be on the first CD.

So... at least two CDs for KDE/GNOME.

Another funny quote

[MrEd]

At the end of the New Installer discussion -

Now you will log into the system and enjoy it.

Yes, SIR! Appropriate for a release called 'sarge'.

Re:Which linux for a newb?

[schnits0r]

Debian:

"Stable". Apt-get is beautiful. jsut type in what you want ot get and you ahve it. Dependancies are always wonderful with this because it deals with it automaticly. The problem is if you use the stable package, be prepared to wait years for a new version of your software. I usually say testing for my install, so my things are relatively current, but not totally buggy. Not really for a total linux newbie, but if you are smart enough to understand basic computer things, you coudl get by.


Mandrake:

URMPI is like apt get, but from what I noticed, not with as many packages. Its my distro of choice at the moment. Things (NFS, SMB, SSH) just work, with minimal setup. If you are migrating, it's the best for that.


Redhat:

Good for enterprize. If you want basic office stuff, this is the distro for oyu. If yu want something any more then what is already on the disk, be prepared for dependancy issues (I knwo there is apt-get, but package selection is limited). Circular dependantcies are a pain in the ass (you want to install A, but can't because oyu need B, but you can't install B because oyu need C, and you can't install C, becasue you need A)


Something else:

Lycoris is another "mirgration" type of linux. The install even has a solitarie game for oyu to play while you wait. It's all dumbed down...I found that to be very limiting.

Slackware was my "first" distro when I was a linux virgin..and I sure promise yo if oyu make that your first distro, you will feel like a virgin. Pain in the ass. I lost many harddrives due to it. Lucky for me, the drives were small 500MBish drives on a 486.

KNoppix. TRy it first. If you can familiarize yourself with knoppix, it helps reduce the risk to your system from a bad install, and you can muck around with it without killing anything important.

Gentoo. Ricer jokes aside, it's a good distro if oyu need a special custom configuration...say if oyu have a 64 bit processor or something, otherwise, be prepared to spend hours and hours compiling linux. (I haven't used Gentoo, but this is what I heard).

There are other distros out there, you will probably install linux several times before oyu find the one that works for you.


http://distrowatch.com/ has a more complete list of distros.

Not bad, but...

[Mock]

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.

Re:Gentoo?

[molnarcs]

Gentoo is perfect for ignorant people. It may even make them feel they're learning something, although they don't.

Haha, that was funny. And true. A friend of mine who used mandrake for a few days went on to install gentoo, for rumour had it that if you can install it, you'll learn a lot about the system.

Spent hours and hours installing it, (which doesn't make too much sense - why not have a functioning system in 5 minutes and then rebuild everything?), installation documentation in his lap, and after a while he managed to install it. Took another day to get alsa working (couldn't help him, I myself was confused by it). Anyway, in a few days, he had a working system with X (and without working kpdf, for he missed a use-flag apparently). And I spent the next few weeks explaining the most trivial things I could learned reading the Introduction to Linux guide on my two-hour trip home on a train. Apparently, my friend didn't buy into the "I'm now a geek cause I installed gentoo" myth, and was very very frustrated. Finally, I dug up the excellent Machtelt Garrels guide (still the best in linuxland for newbies I think) and I lent it to him.

(Then later he switched back to Win2000, and just upgraded to XP recently).

Re:Ubuntu Linux is based on Dabian..

[Skepparn]

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 nopes, not anymore.. Though you can still download cd isos from:http://www.ubuntulinux.org/download/ their download page.

Re:Heh, choice quote, taken out of context, I'm su

[drinkypoo]

You have it backwards; Viagra helps you extend and maintain, not maintain and extend.

Re:Gentoo?

[molnarcs]

Well, you might be right in some respects, but gentoo became a gremlin for me during that time. In other words, I'm biased ;)

He displayed a genuine interest in linux, and I encouraged him to try gentoo (myself already using a ports based "distro"). And later seeing his frustrations, I realized my mistake. I think one of the most important things if you want to get someone on the linux/unix train is documentation. Which is almost there in gentoo, but not quite. The other is: a clear system layout. Debian comes close to it (I might try sarge when it comes out, just to keep my linux skills honed - not long ago I couldn't make usb flash drive work in SuSE, and I felt really embarrassed), but I still didn't know what mplayer.conf does in /etc (or .operarc for that matter).

So my recent method of getting people trying out linux (or freebsd) is to give them a book. I would say: don't touch anything on your computer. Read this or that, and if you are still interested, and enjoyed your reading (because you'll have to do a lot of reading later as well), than you can go on following installation instruction. One important note: never give docs in electronic format. It is easier to grasp the basic concepts if in book form, and (strange as it may sound) without sitting in the front of a puter. And then I would recommend a kind of distro you mentioned: it might be gentoo or debian or slackware, it doesn't really matter (as long as it's not rh or mandrake)

Anyway, for nostalgia's sake, I dug up some of my friend's posts on gentooforums. Note the growing use-flag paranoia (and I refer back to the above post in a post below, just for recursivity's sake. :)

Re:Why does every distribution need to reinvent wh

[Phleg]

Why does each and every distribution need to reinvent the installer and the package management tools and the portage system and the system layout?

Debian is "reinventing" the installer, because it needed to be. The Debian project needed an installer that could be run on any of the dozen or so architectures it supports. Not only that, but they did an excellent job of separating the installer from the frontend it uses. Now that the installer is near completion, it shouldn't be hard to create a GUI frontend to the install scripts.

Not to mention, your question can be answered with the same answer that is used to argue why we shouldn't all just use one operating system, one brand of processor, and one computer manufacturer.

Re:Which linux for a newb?

[Techiegeeks]

Go with Ubuntu. It's Debian based. Very easy to install and use. Check it out at http://www.ubuntulinux.org.

Re:Why does every distribution need to reinvent wh

[fucksl4shd0t]

RedHat and Cygwin share a system I believe (I'm prepared to be corrected here), because Cygwin was originally has ties to RedHat.

Ok. Cygwin has the *worst* package management ever, but one of the best front-ends. Go figure.

A package in Cygwin is a tarball, basically run from /. So you can download a Cygwin package with, say, your web browser, cd / in your cygwin install, tar -xzvf *thefile*, and that installs it. It's crap, it's nothing but crap. Dependency resolution? Don't know how they do it, really, unless the database they use to store packages also contains dependency information.

RPM, on the other hand, stores dependency information and some other useful metadata in the package itself. So theoretically an rpm *can* be installed on a non-rpm-based distribution, provided the rpm program (a perl script, of all things) is available, as well as the other tools needed (tar, a few others). Practically, it doesn't work out so well, and I wouldn't really try ot install an rpm into a non-rpm-based system, and there's even incompatibility between rpm-based systems, but it's not the fault of the package manager, it's the fault of the fools that arranged the system in incompatible ways, and for what? Vendor lock-in? Anyway, the problems come in with some of the optional flags. Some rpms can be installed anywhere if you pass a flag to rpm, but some rpms (anything built by Mandrake, one of my pet peeves with them) *must* be installed where they specify. Furthermore, some package maintainers specify specific versions of dependencies that they really don't need to specify, making it so that their package can only install on a narrow range of distributions that came out when that particular dependency was standard at that version. Luckily, most package maintainers don't do that, myself for example. When I put dependencies on pyAlarm, I just specified "pyao" and "pymad", no versions. So it would install if you had them, or if you used urpmi you could install the dependencies too, and it worked fine. (Granted, there were no doubt numerous bugs on numerous other systems that I never heard about, the new system in pyAlarm's much better, because it does its own dependency checking at runtime, but that's not an optimal solution for every program)

Anyway, Cygwin wasn't developed by RedHat. It was developed by someone else (I forget who), and RedHat acquired them. So now Cygwin is owned by RedHat, where previously it wasn't.

Re:Ubuntu Linux is based on Dabian..

[clacke]

You haven't been doing your homework. From http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ (the front page, this text has been there for several weeks):

UPDATE: The Ubuntu CD Distribution System will NOT close to new orders for Warty CDs as previously announced. Thanks to everyone who emailed to ask us to keep the free CD shipments going for Warty. See the CD FAQ for more info.

Haven't received mine yet, though.

Interview is out-of-date already

[run2000]

KDE 3.3.1 had just made the Sarge mirrors. I doubt they'd pull it out and go back to 3.2.3 for release.