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A Look at Debian Etch Beta 3
An anonymous reader writes "The All about Linux blog has a down-to-earth review of the latest Linux offering from Debian — Etch Beta 3 which optionally sports a very intuitive GUI installer. The review looks ar the pros and cons of Debian Etch Beta 3 as well as what the Debian team could do to make this not-for-profit Linux distribution even more popular."
It's nice to see Etch moving closer towards release, it's been too long since Sarge imo. Although there's a new shiny installer which seems to give lots of (easy) control over how you set up your system, there seems little else other than updated packages. This might not be a bad thing however, if the time taken between the Sarge release and this one has been put into making a generally rock solid distro. For many people, being able to rely on having no stability problems is very important. So I think Debian should stick to this path. Moving towards making it user friendly for the linux newbie as the article suggests isn't a good plan unless they have devs sitting around with nothing to do. There are plenty of distros out there which provide for these people (e.g. Ubuntu).
I have net-installed debian over a phone line, a full desktop with firefox and icewm, abiword, gnumeric, etc.
The initial X setup was frustrating because I downloaded a bunch of stuff for the wrong video card. However, even with that the whole setup took less than a day. The final installed image was less than 600 MB (excluding the package cache, which I apt-get cleaned).
So it is definitely possible. A lot of bloat needs to be addressed in Debian as in other linuxes -- I am pretty sure it could have been half the size. This was more than a year ago however (not that Debian changes that fast).
I'm a debian user. I'm not trying to troll. But, it's the same damn installer. The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.
Badass Resumes
Forgive me, but besides making it easier for these sorts of previews/reviews, I don't see why there is a 'screenshot' button in the main install window. It's not exactly such a central feature that it should be placed right beside the 'continue/go back' buttons. I realize this is the 'expert gui', but that isn't an excuse for sloppy design. I don't necessarily think this feature should disappear, but it should be moved somewhere else, perhaps in a menu and/or left as a hotkey.
I realize I'm nitpicking here, and it's nice to see Debian trying to make their system more user friendly, however I hope they have someone who has a strong background in interface design working with them. Having windows and buttons in their install doesn't automatically make it easier to use.
It's *not* beta 3, it's D-I beta 3. There's a difference.
Thanks to a bug in base-config in sarge, apt-setup lines are created as testing. You either end up with a case of Frankenserver, or if you dist-upgrade, a complete etch install.
This was fixed in base-config 2.66 in June 2005. It's too bad that base-config remained at 2.53.10 for both sarge r1 in December 2005 and sarge r2 in April 2006.
In other words, anyone who installed Debian sarge and blindly did apt-get update; apt-get upgrade unknowingly upgraded themselves to etch, except for packages that required dist-upgrade or manual installation (i.e. kernels).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Back in the day, Linux installers truly suffered from complexity and other ailments. This was one of the reasons that turned people away from running Linux. Recently, many graphical updates have cured Linux of these ailments. IMO I think that the current debian installer is perfectly fine. While I understand that there is always room for impovement, perhaps it is time that distros moved on to tackle other problems that prevent people from using Linux more commonly such as wireless support.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
The main advantage of the graphical installer is support for complex scripts. Otherwise, it's the same thing with color.
ZOMGUSEUBUNTU! :-) Oh wait. This isn't digg?
The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.
That might be because computer set up is not intuitive. Device drivers, naming conventions and file system arrangement follow few conventions and there are many correct combinations. Worse, the user is at their ISP or network administrator's mercy for almost all of the network set up.
What Debian's installer has always done is inform. The Debian install is one of the most informative of Linux installs outside of Gentoo. It tells you what it's doing, offers hints for common situations and tells you where you need information from someone else.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's always nice to see someone appreciating Debian for what it is: simple, stable and free. The installer is only the beginning. File structure, modules and software configuration all follow the same philosophy. This makes maintaining and adding to the system as easy as it was to set up. It's easy to customize and hard to make it bloated. Nothing is hidden and everything is easy to change through text file manipulation or various GUIs. The lack of non free software makes a difference in start up time, smooth running and customization. Right now, that blocks you out of a lot of entertainment, such as YouTube, but things are quickly changing on that front. For basic desktop and laptop use, Etch is an excellent contender. If you need Flash and all that, there are Debian derivatives like Xandros, Ubuntu or Mepis. Those distributions might still be better for a complete Linux newbie. For people who want a system for work and who have a few years of unix, Debian is calling.
That said, I wish Ravi could be a little more patient. When he writes:
how much effort will it take to provide a download link to the latest version of Debian simultaneously recommending a specific version for desktop users (even if it is in beta stage) on the main page of debian.org site ? I would guess not much. The download link provided at present takes the visitor to Debian Sarge which is too outdated for use as a Desktop.
he should know that Etch is due to go stable in December. That's just three months away! At that time, Etch will be as easy to find as Sarge is today. The release roadmap does not have a general freeze until October and newbies should wait until then if they, like Ravi, don't have a good network connection. Though Etch has been a great distribution to use for a year or so, there have been a lot of package changes. Not all of them have been smooth and there's nothing like 500MB of update to sour a Debian newbie.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Calling this a beta is misleading. Etch is currently the Debian 'testing' distro, which means it is undergoing constant, incremental updating. All the people that complain about the slow release cycle, or expect the packages included in this 'beta' review to be the same as what you'll download tomorrow, don't understand how Debian works.
The time between stable releases is indeed quite long, but when a new app version is released by the upstream developers it often appears in Debian unstable within a day or two, and from there into testing in the space of a few weeks. Which means you can have a (slightly) unstable Debian system that is at most days behind the most cutting edge distro, or an almost rock-solid Debian 'testing' system that is rarely more than a month behind. You're only stuck with the two year release cycle if you cannot tolerate any problems whatsoever. And if you are working on something that critical, you shouldn't be going anywhere near applications with less than 10 days of field-testing (the minimum to pass from unstable to testing) anyways, regardless of which distro you run.
yp.
My distro is more dapper than yours.
+++ATH0
OK, it's nice to see someone trying to give an even handed approach to a distro. But I think there are a few points that could be improved upon.
In the end there are some comments about the Debian web site regarding the use of weblogs for technical support and a cleaner site so you can find the razor sharp release of etch.
Weblogs for technical support suck. There are better ways of doing it. I have found mailing lists to be far superior to web logs for the simple reason that they are more accessabble, easier to read (no ads, no extra content fighting for your attentions) and above all else, filterable by machines and humans based on content, writer, and subject. Weblogs are for little people who want to talk about support, not get it. Yes, I'm very opinionated about this. I've yet to have a good experience with weblogs and technical support.
Debian Etch 3 is not for the new user. If it was, it would be called stable. Yet everyone insists on reviewing this one. The fact that it's harder to find from the debian front page is a good thing. I would not want to have to support something that hasn't yet been released. Similarly, expert mode is not for the faint of heart. Making a comment that it would be nice to provide more information for the new user in expert mode's use of FSCK is retarded. expertmode it not intended for the new user -- don't expect it to be.
Why does everyone have to review the installation process itself? Sure, it's the first introduction to the OS and that means something. But everyone makes such a big deal about nice looking gui installers. What's the value in a gui installer versus a curses based installer when you are trying to get the job done. I'm sure Debian will benefit greatly because of this but in reality it's not a requirement to getting the job done.
All that said, I would like to see reviews done not on the first 5 minutes of use of a distro but based on the first 90 days or 12 months of use on a distro. This is were it matters most. These 5 minute reviews are like a one night stand. You won't really know what you have landed until you see the make-up come off.
I have to confess, I'm a fan of Debian. Never tried Unbuntu. But I've tried Gentoo, RedHat, and Suse 9. After using these for 18 months I dropped them all and went back to Debian. That's my idea of a review. I had to use the things for a long period of time and live with their decisions long enough to understand what they were doing and not doing well.
Gentoo -- not my favorite. I like the idea behind it, but they have this uncanny ability during upgrades to allow the user to do amazingly stupid things based on stupid ideas to begin with. I trashed my fstab file based on an upgrade from gentoo. Why would the distro EVER consider upgrading a file like fstab? Really, if there's any reason why a working system should have one of it's most critical files ever considered as upgradable I would love to hear it. This is just an example of the difficulties in upgrading -- hundreds of diff files to sort through every few days.
RedHat -- They just had some weird stuff that was really inconsistent. Everytime I change my firewall rules, my ntpserver was disabled. WTF? Inconsistent behaviour that was never disclosed during the operation. And I don't like their GUI approach of making everything appear as one. Too socialistic for me.
Suse -- I used this one the longest and found the greatest problem with it over time. Suse does a superior job of supporting you hardware/software needs as long as you do exactly what they expect you to do. Installation of anything beside KDE you are stepping closer to the edge. Custom configurations of installations will push you to a point where Suse will not upgrade/manage that package for you and before you know it -- you're running a whole software space in customized RPM's or having your installation re-configured back to the basics during upgrades.
Debian -- It's not the easiest to configure. But it's the most polite about allowing you to make modifications, keep those modifications, and follow expected behaviours. And it's stable, allowing me more time to do the fun stuff.
So "D.E.B. 3" is a beta of Debian 4?
http://outcampaign.org/
Maybe I'm prejudiced because my Ubuntu disk hung on my test machine and I didn't think much of the Kubuntu I downloaded but I like Debian the more I use it and I'm glad I went with their base foundation. Switching to testing for close to a year, I think people will be surprised that the packages are pleasantly current.
As for the installation, there really is a question of how simple you can realistically want it to be. AT LEAST IT ISN"T DEBIAN WOODY!!
Do Not Run Experimental. It is not designed to run and is just a short term package testing area for new updates before they wander down to sid. I recommend that you shouldn't even look at experimental till you have been using sid for several years and know how to recover from completely breaking your system if you grab a juicy package two days before it filters into sid. This is likely to happen.
I ate your fish.