Interview with Adam Di Carlo (Debian Boot) 150
robstah writes: "The installer is the heart of any Operating System, Debian is no different. The mature but ageing boot-floppies installer will rear its head for the last time in woody. In this interview with Adam Di Carlo, one of the lead developers of this system we investigate the past, present and future of the Debian installation system ready for the upcoming release of woody: The next generation of Debian."
boot floppies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken (Score:2, Informative)
Debian Anyone? (Score:1, Informative)
Best Way to do a Debian Install (Score:4, Informative)
1. Download and write to floppy the image-1.44/compact disks (rescue, root, and driver-1).
2. Boot with Rescue in.
3. Follow the directions.
DHCP makes this a blast and you're into Dselect (or tasksel if you want) within fifteen minutes at most. You end up download much less than an entire ISO in most cases, and it's better because you're always going to get the latest packages.
If you have to do an install on multiple machines, download the entire tree for your distro onto one machine, and set it up as a server with FTP or somesuch so that APT can access that local machine as a repository. Over 100baseTX, it takes no time at all to do an install (after all, a fast hard drive over ethernet is probably faster than your cdrom drive is anyways
There are also ReiserFS boot disks available now that will let you get up and running with a great journalling filesystem from scratch, with the selection of one simple option.
I found the Debian installer much easier to use than Red Hat's, and much more powerful than Mandrake's.
Give it a try! You won't go back!
Re:Boot Floppies aren't "aging"! (Score:4, Informative)
That said, the installer can and will still work with floppies, CD-ROMs, NFS, HTTP/FTP and whatnot.
Re:Bare bones CD-ROM installation media. (Score:2, Informative)
Fix it! Please! (Score:2, Informative)
Debian is a wonderful distribution (even for new users, now) once you've got it running, but if you think any "entry level users" can sit down at a Debian installation and have the slightest hope of getting through it successfully, you're deluding yourself.
Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken (Score:2, Informative)
I've read discussion on debian-boot, where joeyh stated that aptitude would advance into base and replace dselect. This got reflected in aptitude's latest ChangeLog, but I don't know if it will really happen. Anyway, aptitude is a lot nicer than dselect.
On the other hand, what Debian really needs to do is enhance and extend the aforementions tasksel utility. Tasksel has the right idea, but it doesn't go far enough.
I'm sad to tell you that we dropped old-style tasks for woody and did a new implementation. This is not bad, but it seems tasks got tidied up quite a bit and there are fewer around now.
Michael
Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken (Score:3, Informative)
And people who don't believe him should consider the fact that "getting boot-floppies into shape" has been (if we can trust my memory) a MAJOR cause of delays in the last two releases.
(this is not to fault Adam, who does wonderful work, but rather to emphasize that the code is just too fragile to be kept alive)
Daniel