Slashdot Mirror
Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (r0a) Quick Tour
linuxbeta writes "At OSDir there's a tour of the fixed Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (r0a) release. After 3 years we finally get to have a look at the new Debian, including their new installer. Release notes. Only occasionally does this new release differ from Ubuntu."
Spoken like someone who hasn't installed Red Hat in 8 years. Red Hat's Anaconda installer looks a lot like that even today in text mode. Unlike Debian, Red Hat doesn't care if their distribution runs on anything other than x86 so they can target making an X11 install that looks pretty. Debian on the other hand has to get the most bang-for-the-buck on all their supported platforms so they felt a text installer would work best. After installing 5 systems with sarge on them from scratch I haven't had any issues. All my hardware was auto-detected and it grabbed an address via DHCP automatically. I installed Debian doing nothing but hitting the enter key on each screen to accept the defaults to show someone how easy it was. The only one I think I had to move the arrow key over was the partitioning part of it. All in all, the Debian text installer is as easy, if not easier, than installing Windows 2000/XP/2003 or Red Hat.
My only qualm with it is I would've liked to have the option of assigning the install a static address rather than having it grab one automatically from my DHCP server, but that was easily remedied after the install was finished. It's probably even a configurable option but Debian Sarge was so easy to install I didn't see much point in even looking at the release notes unless I had a problem.