Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Debian Installer RC1 Is Out

Posted by timothy on Sun Aug 08, 2004 11:50 AM
from the smoosh-it-onto-a-machine dept.
Debian
rekt writes "The Debian crew has just announced the release of debian-installer RC1. You can find versions of it for 11 different architectures at the d-i page. This is one of the most flexible, modular installer architectures out there. As we near the release of sarge (debian 3.1) next month, it's important that we find and work out any bugs in the installer. Grab a copy and give it a shot!"
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Debian Installer RC1 Is Out 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Full RC1 torrents. (Score:5, Informative)

    by eddy (18759) on Sunday August 08 2004, @11:57AM (#9913925) Homepage Journal

    .. available at suprnova.org.

    Debian 3.1 (Sarge) Release Candidate 1 - CD 1 of 12 [66.90.75.92] ...

  • Security Support for Sarge (Score:5, Informative)

    by arturogatti (550637) on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:03PM (#9913956)
    Security support for sarge is scheduled to begin today [debian.org]. Woody users may want to consider upgrading to sarge now, testing the upgrade path, and help out with reporting/fixing any bugs they encounter.

  • Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

    by adun (127187) on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:12PM (#9914003)
    http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/ [debian.org]

    Because I love all of you.

    • Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Looking at the screenshots I miss one thing compared to YaST from SuSE: On the left side YaST has a pane with lots of help text for every dialog. The really big advantage is that it's very helpful for newbies or people who never have bothered about that part of a setup but at the same time doesn't get into the way of experienced users. Just perfect! Documentation whenever you want it and streamlined installation for the know-it-alls.

      I nonetheless are very eager to try the new installer.

    • Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Insightful)

      by base_chakra (230686) on Sunday August 08 2004, @01:09PM (#9914291)
      Mods and flamers get ready: I'm about to criticize Debian (even though it's my favorite distro).

      The fact that there are 231 screenshots of the new installer should raise some flags. 231!! Excluding a handful of error screens and progress bars, that suggests that in some circumstances the user would have to field more than 200 interactive prompts during the installation process. I should hope that many of these can either be consolidated or eliminated.

      I had high hopes (too high) about the new hardware detection; I would be happy if these kinds of prompts [debian.org] disappear from the final build. You know the kind... the ones that require either clairvoyance, a second computer for hardware research, or the degree of advance preparation that only the IRS would demand.

      • Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

        by Daniel (1678) <(dburrows) (at) (debian.org)> on Sunday August 08 2004, @01:37PM (#9914417)
        I used an older build to install a system the other day, and I hardly even had to hit the Enter key. (ok, the system didn't work once it was set up, but that turned out to be my fault, not the installer's :) )

        If you scan through some of those screens, you'll discover that the reason there are so many is that you can take branches in the installer: for instance, if you choose to set up RAID, you get a bunch of screens about the RAID configuration; if the network can't be set up via DHCP, you get screens about setting up the network. A fair number of the screenshots are also screenshots of progress bars, which are noninteractive. (and a huge improvement over the old installer, where you just watched a message like "Setting up the base system..." while the hard drive churned)

        Daniel

        • Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Informative)

          by Afrosheen (42464) on Sunday August 08 2004, @01:49PM (#9914497)
          Mandrake still embraces both styles, you can use a text-based installer with prompts like the old school Redhat installer if you want, it's a commandline switch at boot time. Best of both worlds, or a work around for wacky video hardware.

          No gap here.

      • Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Informative)

        by zerblat (785) <jonas@sk[ ]c.se ['ubi' in gap]> on Sunday August 08 2004, @02:14PM (#9914614) Homepage
        Um, in what way are they the same? They're both curses based, but in what way do pretty graphics make inte easier to install an OS?

        There are many alternative ways [linuxmafia.com] to install Debian, if the default one doesn't suit your needs. Debian needs an installer that is flexible, powerful and portable in order to be usable by all the diverse users of Debian, not to mention the dozen or so different architectures Debian runs on.

        Of course, the Debian developers could have delayed the next release a year or so in order to get a pretty graphical installer working on some platforms. I guess their priorities are different.

      • Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cmacb (547347) on Sunday August 08 2004, @02:25PM (#9914665) Homepage Journal
        Be careful what you wish for. The best Windows installer IMHO was the one for NT. After that they started trying to detect too many devices that would hang the whole process.

        I think the original plan for this Debian release was for a graphical installer, but to be honest I'd rather have one that JUST WORKS, producing a bootable system that can be tinkered with to deal with anything that's not perfect. The new installer, from my experience has improved the detection of devices, reduced the number of questions asked of the user. Once all these things are perfected (or nearly so) I suppose making it graphical will be a nice way to, um, slow down the whole process like Windows does. I can live without it.

        Unlike Windows, the Linux install process is not a monthly maintenance task, so I hardly think it matters how it looks.

      • Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

        by pnot (96038) on Sunday August 08 2004, @05:10PM (#9915634)

        When are they getting with the times and making a decent graphical installer?

        From http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ [debian.net]:

        Question 5: Is the DebianInstaller [debian.net] going to be graphical in nature? / Is there any prebuilt/downloadable graphical DebianInstaller [debian.net]?

        Answer: The DebianInstaller [debian.net] will not be graphical by nature, but modularity is a key in its design. It would allow the use of different kinds of frontends, including those of a graphical nature.

        There is a project underway to create a GTK frontend to the installer. For more information on the current status of this frontend see here [debian.org]. Unfortunately the project hasn't seen much activity lately.

        • I'm not asking for a mandated GUI installer, just an optional one that ships with the CD. Mandrake has been doing it this way for years.

          And yes, I have done headless installs. 2 of my servers are nearly purely ssh beasts with no keyboards or monitors attached, thank you. No cdroms in either one.

  • I've given it a shot (Score:5, Funny)

    by Avian visitor (257765) on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:13PM (#9914007) Homepage
    Grab a copy and give it a shot!

    I've downloaded a copy, burned it on a CD and gave it a few shots.

    This is the result [psychicgoldfish.com].

  • pppoeconf (Score:4, Informative)

    by sewagemaster (466124) <sewagemaster&gmail,com> on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:20PM (#9914037) Homepage
    I've used the nightly builds (>beta4) about 6 times for installations on seperate occations within the last 2 weeks. Everything works much better than previous versions. No problems when it tried to probe my DHCP internet account. I'm now back at school where my pppoe which isn't DHCP based and obviously it failed detection.

    Thankfully the pppoeconf package is unpacked before the initial reboot and is available after the bootstrap. Ran pppoeconf and got my connection. Still, though, I had to do this via virtual console. For the first-time debian user, they may not know pppoeconf as the name to get around this and will be stuck unable to do any sort of net-install.
  • Hey, the main problem I had with woody was that I never got X to install. Did they get that fixed?

  • Debian woes (Score:5, Funny)

    by vuvewux (792756) on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:37PM (#9914111)
    I'm sort of new to this linux thing, but there's this directory on my new install of Debian 3.1 called "/usr/bin". It was all messed up when I first went in there. None of the files had descriptive names, and it took me like an hour to figure out they were executables, since none of them had .exe on the end of them. Furthermore, whenever I double click them, they just pop up a command prompt for a few seconds then go away.

    I was gonna delete them, but I got kinda afraid that they might be my kernel, so I fiugred I'd ask. It's ok to delete this stuff, right?
    • Exe? Just Exe? The proper regexp is more like.

      (lnk|asd|hlp|ocx|reg|bat|c[ho]m|cmd|exe|dll|vxd| pi f|scr|hta|jse?|sh[mbs]|vb[esx]|ws[fh]|wmf)

  • It actually works (Score:5, Interesting)

    by n6mod (17734) on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:48PM (#9914167) Homepage
    I've done four installs with a just-slightly-pre-RC1 netinst snapshot, and in all cases the installer produced a working system with a functional KDE desktop (yes, working X out of the box).

    The X settings were pretty conservative, but they were functional.

    This was such a shock to me that I really believed I'd burned too much karma and was likely to be hit by a bus on the way home.

    I can actually recommend using the native installer instead of Knoppix to do a Debian install now.

  • Install is a breeze (Score:4, Informative)

    by SST-206 (699646) on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:49PM (#9914171) Homepage

    Anyone who still thinks that Debian is hard to install, please think again [thiesen.org]

    A big up to Debian developers everywhere!

    • The commentary accompanying the screenshots is both amusing and to the point. I've installed Debian so many times now that I hardly read the screens any more (Windows installs are the same way by the way... why are all home Windows machines on a workgroup called, uh, "workgroup"?)

      Maybe a future version of the installer should leave the prompts as-is, but take the text for the prompts from a separate file that can be edited by a less technical newbie to eliminate the voodoo element of the whole thing. A w

  • History of the Installer (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:57PM (#9914219)
    Here's the summary of the debian-installer from one of the main developers...

    Joey Hess blog entry: http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/d-i_retrospect ive-2004-08-07-19-46.html [kitenet.net]

    //fatal

  • From my experience as a alpha/beta tester... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 08 2004, @01:09PM (#9914289)
    ...for the upcoming release (and mostly for the new installer), I have observed that a few of the Debian developpers have been less than responsive to major bug reports (like, big common average things not detected automagically as it is with other distros). This, with the fact that Joey Hess quit as release manager just recently, i.e. at a critical stage of the Sarge release, has me starting to wonder about Debian's future.

    Has Debian hit the ceiling in terms of what a volunteer org. can acheive? I mean, are projects of this size be developped and delivered successfully by orgs such as Debian?

    It took *forever* for Sarge to come out and my impression (I hope I am wrong) is that the installer will compare negatively with other distros installers. This and other config/post-install details that are bad in my mind make me truly wonder if Debian can continue in its current shape.

    Is it because of the incessant splitting of hairs on "political" issues or what, I don't know. But to push Joey Hess to quit, something bad must be happening at the core of Debian.

    Maybe I'm overly pessimistic because I'm transposing my personal non-tech feelings on everything today (I am in the doghouse with the girl-friend, long story), but the bad vibes I got when learning of the resignation of the Debian Sarge release coordinator do pre-dates my current predicament.

    I wonder if Joey Hess did say anything (interview, somewhere?) about all of this. Joey, if you are reading this, can you comment with some insider's perspective?

    • Re:From my experience as a alpha/beta tester... (Score:4, Informative)

      by joey (315) <joey@kitenet.net> on Sunday August 08 2004, @04:07PM (#9915243) Homepage
      In fact I am reading this and you seem to be seriously confused. I've not quit anything.
    • [...]the fact that Joey Hess quit as release manager just recently[...]
      AFAIK, Joey Hess was never release manager. OTOH, Anthony Towns, the previous RM recently resigned [debian.org]. I don't know why he chose to resign, but I'm guessing that it has to do with the fact that being RM is an extremly stressful position, and there's been various incidents, e.g. the discussion about the inclusion of non-free non-software in sarge [debian.org], the attempt to force amd64 into sarge [debian.org], etc. I don't know.
      Has Debian hit the ceiling in terms of what a volunteer org. can acheive?
      I don't see any reason to believe that.
      It took *forever* for Sarge to come out[...]
      So did woody. Woody was delayed because d-i wasn't anywhere near finished, and they had to pick up boot-floppies and hack it into something installable. Sarge was delayed because d-i took a while to finish -- in part because very little work was done while boot-floppies was worked on for woody.
      I wonder if Joey Hess did say anything (interview, somewhere?) about all of this.
      Joey has a blog [kitenet.net] where you can read his thoughts. Of course, I'm guessing you're really interested in aj's comments.

  • Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jakeg (673209) on Sunday August 08 2004, @02:52PM (#9914810) Homepage
    Okay... so finally I was going to take the linux plunge with this. I don't want to use a CD okay, so don't go and suggest I do. I want to boot from a usb drive with a minimal install and download packages i want over the net.

    I want to gunzip the boot.img.gz directly onto my usb drive and then boot from that. As per the instructions at: http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apb.ht ml

    But how the hell do i get the boot.img.gz onto the usb drive? I could do it if I was already running linux apparently, but I'm not. Any ideas? I can gunzip it fine, but I need to write it directly to the usb drive. From what I can find, there's no program which can currently do that in windows. Th e catch 22 is that i would need linux first to do it. If anyone can please,please help tell me how to write the .img to a usb drive using windows then please please do! That's currently the only thing stopping me using linux.

    • My results... (Score:4, Informative)

      by CptnHarlock (136449) on Sunday August 08 2004, @05:53PM (#9915907) Homepage
      I succeded in transfering the filesystem to the USB drive from windows but my comp seems to be unwilling to boot from the USB device. Try what I did and maybe your comp will react better.

      This is what I did...

      1 Get the dd [swin.edu.au] utility from here. Unzip it and put it into your c:\winnt directory (unless you want to mess with env. variables [PATH]).

      2. Get the boot.img.gz [ucsc.edu] image from here. For some unexplainable reason Windows unpacked it for me to its real size (ca 123 Mb). Maybe because I have winrar installed? Maybe not. Winrar should be able to unpack it anyway.

      3. Get the bootbf2_4-xfs_iso.zip [debian.org] and read this [debian.org] to be able to unpack it. I like this ISO because it the kernel has XFS support. Choose any other you prefer.

      4. Start a cmd.exe and use "dd --list" to see your devices so that dd can use them. (dd is used to copy raw data). My usb device was I: and in the listin I could read:

      \\.\Volume{45e7b0b0-e981-11d8-be69-00a0c9ca4794}\
      Mounted on i:\

      5. After finding your USB device in the list dd the boot.img to the device:

      dd boot.img.gz \\.\Volume{45e7b0b0-e981-11d8-be69-00a0c9ca4794}\

      6. If that worked copy the unpacked bootbf2.4-xfs.iso file to your USBs root directory.

      7. Reboot the comp and enter the BIOS setup. Set it to boot from your USB (or USB-ZIP) device.

      The filesystem on my friends USB drive is fine and I can mount it from windows and Linux. The filesystem si 128Mb big and the device is 256 so it seemd to have worked fine (since the iso was supposed to have a 128Mb fs). I have one comp that is supposed to be bootable from USB but the USB device (mp3-player) itself seems to not react untill the OS is up. maybe that's why it won't boot? I hope. Hope you have better luck!.. :)

      Cheers...

    • Re:screenshots (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 08 2004, @12:15PM (#9914021)

      AIUI the installer is still text-based and looks pretty much like the old boot-floppies, but this time with good hardware detection, aptitude instead of dselect , and streamlined to minimize the number of questions.

      However, the installer is very modular and it should be possible to write a graphical front-end. In fact, a prototype exists, but I'm pretty sure it won't be used for the release.

    • Nope, its still console based ( i asked this last time this came up around here.. )

      But, if you are running a i386, you can goto progeny.com and get a sarge+anaconda installer set..

      That said, the 'new' debian installer isnt bad for someone that knows what they are doing, the main target for stock Debian anyway...

    • Re:Isn't it time... (Score:5, Informative)

      by davegaramond (632107) on Sunday August 08 2004, @02:03PM (#9914571)
      Yes, yes, parent is a troll. But...

      Debian (stable) is geared towards server, the whole Gentoo thing is geared towards desktop or experimental.

      Debian has always had the philosophy of free distribution and legal safety, I've seen none of this in Gentoo. I love the Debian philosophy.

      Debian is a mature distribution with a strict QA, I still don't believe Gentoo has a decent QA "department" at all.

      None of the datacenters/dedicated servers facility that I know offer Gentoo, for each one you mention supporting Gentoo, I can name 25 supporting Debian.

      Gentoo has bleeding edge stuffs, that's why I don't want it.

      Debian has complete support forum (debianplanet), a portal (debianplanet), ten times the number of mailing lists than Gentoo, local user groups, not to mention SEVERAL newsletters with real content.

      Debian has Knoppix, etc based on it.

      Debian has at least twice the number of worldwide mirrors compared to Gentoo;

      As for "versions", you can upgrade from between Debian versions pretty much seamlessly.

        • In 2005 the software in Sarge will be as old as Woody is now. (Think Gnome 1.3.)

          I don't understand why anyone believes this is a meaningful complaint. I know plenty of people still using Windows 95 and 98 on desktop systems, and I've installed Debian Woody on plenty of desktop systems. My desktop machine tracks unstable only because I need it for development. For the end-user, do you honestly think they want to install a new version of their OS every six months (or download 100+ MB of updates every mo

    • Re:Which discs? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jrschulz (684749) on Sunday August 08 2004, @02:12PM (#9914611) Homepage

      Anyone know which discs are needed for what installation you might want?

      For a normal installation you only need to get the first two or three discs. If you have a fairly fast internet connection, you can even go with the netinst image [debian.org]. This installs a base system, reboots, and then you can get every package you want from a local mirror.

      j.

    • Re:New installer? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 08 2004, @02:37PM (#9914727)
      No, the new one just looks identical to the old one. It can have a GUI thrown over the top, though, by anyone. Debian just hasn't done it because it's low priority and most Debianites are of the opinion that it's perfect as it is (I agree).

      The new features are hardware detection, auto-partitioning, and hooks for a gui. Some people have worked on one... not sure what links to give you because I don't personally care.

      I'm with the crowd that thinks graphical installers are ridiculous: they have higher hardware requirements, increase the chance of "killer" errors by several hundred percent, and they change nothing except appearances and the input device. Instead hitting the down arrow a few times and then Enter, you move a pointer down with your mouse and click Yes. All the same questions have to be asked, in the same order. The practical implications are so overwhelming compared to the aesthetic ones that it's just no contest, in my mind. For example, no graphical front-end to the installer will work on all 11 architectures that Debian could be installed on. Just expensive eye candy...
      • Or what about the jump to a new installer?

        Whatever, the version number ain't nothin' but a number. The only thing that matters is that it increases for every release. Of course, the easiest thing would be to just skip the minor number and increment the major number for every release.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.