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Major New Features in Debian Etch
Klaidas writes "Linux.com reports that the third beta of Debian Etch installer (released August 11, 2006) has some major new features, which might make this version of Debian the easiest to install.
According to the original announcement, we will now be able to install using a graphical user interface on i386 and amd64 platforms. We will also be able to set up encrypted partitions during installation. Debian Etch is scheduled to be released on December 2006"
Etch-A-Sketch runs Debian?!
> The installer is designed to work at a resolution of 600x800
Hm, looks like a rotated old LCD monitor.
I am teh Old Skool. Any Debian installation that does not require lamb's blood, sulfur, salt, mercury, a transcription from the original Assyrian, Fermat's Enigma, and a Circle of Power etched in holy chalk consecrated on Michaelmas is a Debian installation for which I have no use.
Friggin' noobs...
I believe that installation is one of Linux's biggest stumbling blocks to larger adaoption. I spend most of my Linux time running Live CDs where there is no OS installation at all (I love you Ubuntu). The issue for many home users is software installation. While there have been significant inroads made in this area over that past few years, it has generally not yet reached Windows' "double click the .exe to run" simplicity. Linux has a huge following among the geeks, nerds, and geeky nerds. It is also growing into mobile devices where people will have no idea they are running Linux and schools on the desktop. The biggest market that needs to be tapped is the "average" computer user at home. People need to feel that Linux is user friendly and can easily do everything that they want to do. Firefox and OoO (both of which I run on my WinXP laptop) have brought it that much closer to the goal. Now easier software installation is the next step.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, is this not a sign of how far behind the rest of the Linux world Debian has let itself fall? An installation GUI touted as a "major new feature"?
For years, Debian was heralded for it's packaging system, and yes apt-get is/was great. But the rest of the distros caught up, and easy, automated installation and updating is now a feature that one expects in a Linux distro as standard equipment. Just like a GUI installer.
This is like a car manufacturer in 2006 saying they've just added airbags to their cars, and it's a "major new feature!"
It's not a major new feature. It's about damn time.
And for those of you who are noobs, here is how to install Linux on a dead badger.
qntm.org
Did you even read the title there? Illegal to refuse to decrypt.
Not illegal to have encrypted partitions. A non-issue if you give the police your password when they ask you for it.
On the other side of the ocean, it's a potential starter for when HIPAA-level security is required.
Even if your physical location can't be secured you can still keep the data private.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
stolen HD? yes, but no good against stolen computer (and only good if the crooks cannot do the above two)
Yes, good against a stolen computer, as mounting the said partition requires the right passphrase.
Lex
1)
Hah, you had it easy--in my day, we had to use dselect!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I mean, even Gentoo has a graphical install now (though not a very user-friendly one, of course...)
FTA:
So it would actually be 2002. ;-)
According to the blurb from FTA, the graphical installer supports everything available in the regular curses installer, so yes, support for installing onto LVM and software RAID should work perfectly.
TBH I can't see what all the fuss is about. To my knowledge, Debian has never marketed itself as a general purpose distro for desktops a la Grandma Linux, it's always just been a damned stable system that's particularly suited to servers (it's utterly fantastic to do an apt-get dist upgrade and be 99% certain that nothing will go wrong). Last I heard, Debian were quite content for others to use this as a baseline to extend Debian into the user-friendly market, hence distros like Ubuntu.
Like I keep saying over and over again - there's a place for Debian, just like there's a place for Ubuntu. A corporate server farm doesn't need a GUI installer - they have one of their code-fu's do a single install and then roll out an image to 300 empty boxes via BOOTP. Someone rolling out Debian on the desktop at a company would do much the same thing. If you've wanted a pretty installer that'll make the process easier on the eye, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE have been on the game for years. Do people decry LFS for not having a GUI installer?
Disclaimer: I like and use Debian at home and at work. I've never had any problems with the text mode installer, but likewise I've never had problems telling someone to use Ubuntu for their first distro rather than Debian. Different strokes.
£0.02
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
GUI doesn't necessarily mean easy to me.
.iso file are too damned confusing.
GUI does mean slow and many times buggier to me.
GUI means (to me) that, unless shown in a text box, long error messages will be truncated or summarized.
That said, I've never installed Debian from scratch. Instructions to get (which?)
I've had no problems with the Ubuntu alternate install. A few years back I was installing Gentoo and though it was involved, I wasn't confused about what to download, thanks to the Handbook.
If they want to market to Joe Average, they should clean up their website.
This article is worthless without pictures!
One of its real advantages is that it allows installation in nine new languages that cannot be displayed in the regular installer.
2 006/08/debian-testing-gui-installer-1.thumbnail.pn g2 006/08/debian-testing-gui-installer-paritition-dis ks-2.png
I have also noticed that GUI installer is bit faster than the regular text based regular installer. However, this installer is not as polished as RHEL or Suse Linux GUI installer but project promises to polish it later on... If you are interested you can see Screen shots -
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/wp-content/uploads/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/wp-content/uploads/
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
The catch is that you need to tilt your monitor.
From TFA:
The installer is designed to work at a resolution of 600x800;
No, but to be fair, granny doesn't really know how to install windows or OS X either.
Badass Resumes
AFAIK the encryption key is required during the boot process. If the computer is shutdown during the removal process, then it'll need the key when the computer boots back up. The normal way to do this is to stick the key on a USB stick, which you insert while the computer is booting. Once the machine is online, you physically remove the USB key, and store it somewhere else. This is great if you have a machine at location you don't physically control, and you want your data to be safe from prying eyes if you machine is ever taken without your consent.
Lets face it, before yum, rpm was a pain in the ass. Before yum, rpm users were likely to find themselves in "rpm hell" seeking numerous rpm packages that were required by whatever they sought to install. Many people who migrated to debian or gentoo during that period are likely to have only bad memories of the rpm packaging system.
Badass Resumes
I have been using SuSE's encrypted partitions for more than 3 years now, they have always been completely integrated into the graphical installer.
Yes, they do require someone to enter the (very long!) passphrase during the OS startup process, but that's a small price for the measure of peace of mind that it provides.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
apt-get install scroll-knobs
DING DING DING, WE HAVE A WINNER.
My mother, grandmother, neighbors, co-workers, and non-technical friends still can't slap an install disk for Windows or OSX in to their home computer without sweating, cursing, and praying. They still don't know how to find and install drivers that windows doesn't ship with, and they sure as HELL don't have the patience to do all of that as routinely as it needs to happen on windows.
As a rule I format my Windows desktop once a year or more after regular use. The typical user, with their tendency to click [Yes] to every piece of spy/mal/shitware on the internet should probably be formatting every 6 months. But they don't, even with how simple the installs are, because they're intimidated even by Windows' "easy" install. (F6 to install drivers the moment the installer starts, and have the driver on a floppy. Still. On XP. When a lot of XP machines ship with no floppy. Anybody like that part?)
Even Mac users tend to sweat and curse when you tell them to do an install that wipes the drive, and that's saying something. The OSX installer is dead simple, and it will pretty much always have drivers for all the base system hardware, yet Mac users still sweat it.
Let's face it, easy GUI installers, while nice, will not bring people over to linux. It's not why they choose Windows to begin with. Let's say the reasons all together now:
"It's what I use at work"
"Microsoft Office support"
"It came with the computer"
"I need Internet Explorer"
"I'm familiar with it and don't want to learn a new system"
"It runs the software I use without any hassle"
Nowhere in the list for Joe Q. Public is "That old text based installer is the staleness. GUI installers are the new freshness, get with the times linux!"
Debian might win over a couple Windows server administrators looking to dabble in linux with this, but that's about it.
Well, the bit about the virgins is true, but if you sacrifice the nerd, who will complete the installation?
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
And for those of you who are noobs, here is how to install Linux on a dead badger.
Heh, my work place's web proxy blocked the site with the following message (emaphasis unchanged): "The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Criminal Skills"
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm really glad to see the official Debian project making good moves on installation; though people gripe about the focus placed on installation ("How many times do you install a frickin' OS?" goes the refrain), it really is important. People who might be interested in and benefit from Free software are under no obligation to spend confusing hours getting things to install; it's true that most OSes get stuck on a machine and stay there for a while, but that doesn't mean that installation can be ignored. With Free Software OSes especially, it's actually really nice to be able to install whenever you want, without worrying about intrusive "validation" procedures, etc -- I know I dabble with various OSes, just to check out what's new.
That said, to install a Debian system by means *other* than the official installer can be a pretty easy process, especially if you're a bit flexible (just for a few seconds, I swear!) about what constitutes Debian. (And since I really am a perpetual newbie, I think that I'm not exaggerating the ease I'm claiming.) A few examples:
Xandros: a mix of commercial / proprietary stuff, but it's based on straight Debian. Easy to install, nicely graphical, supports a lot of hardware, and (I didn't realize until yesterday) can read and write NTFS, which their sales reps say is unique among out-of-the-box commercial Linux distros. That sounds unlikely to me, but I can't think of a counterexample off-hand. You don't have to use their proprietary stuff.
Ubuntu: Yes, there are divergences, but there's no denying that Ubuntu is at heart a Debian operating system.
Knoppix (along with Kanotix, and many of the other Knoppix derivatives)is nicely installable.
The eLive Live CD not only is one of the easiest ways to install a Debian system, but also one of the simplest ways to install and play with Enlightenment.
And of course I've named just a few of the Live CDs based on Debian, a great many of which are installable.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Even Sarge's installer is not hard to use. You don't have to do anything from scratch, you just answer questions. If you can't install the system with that, you probably couldn't use it either. There will be a lot to tweak after the installation anyway. Implementing a straightforward installed is probably not one of the biggest problems. It does not count as "major new features".
This may not counter your position, but Debian *is* the foundation for Ubuntu, which has come out of nowhere and taken the Linux desktop into a position it's often longed to have.
As a community-driven OS, it definitely has its place.
The release cycle for Debian has indeed been glacial at best. I think I lived a few lifetimes and was incarnated a few times while waiting for sarge. I think also everyone involved with Debian acknowledges how horrific their release cycles were. They seem to be getting better.
I wouldn't call it a "nice try" - Debian has a reputation for being stable and risk-averse over the bleeding edge cycles of other distributions. They are arguably the most "BSD-ish" of the Linux distributions in this respect. This is why a lot of server admins, including myself, pick up on using Debian over say CentOS or RHEL. I've used it for years on production systems and have never regretted it.