Interview with Adam Di Carlo (Debian Boot)

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."

Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[Lethyos]

The Debian installer IMHO, is very elegant, smooth, and has a near perfect balance of functionality for power users and entry level users alike. Power users generally get the flexability they need, and entry level users only need to contribute a little bit more thought than say, RedHat's installer. I say, KISS, and hang onto this installer for a little while longer. The only real problem I've ever seen with Debian's installer was the dselect stage, where most users choke completely. That however, has become an option and users may now run the simple and straight foward tasksel util. If the Debian people are going to try and replace this installer, I certainly hope they keep the existing paradigms around for those of us who love Debian as it is (it's the only perfect distro in my book).

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. It's not very extensive and it'd be nice to break things down into smaller groups without having to jump all the way over to dselect. For example, from tasksel, installing the TeX packages is clear, but maybe I want all the immediately necessary LaTeX components and not all the utilities that convert TeX to every other format imaginable for documents. But make this a hierarchial option that's hidden in tree form under this task. That'll give us more middle ground between tasksel and dselect.

Bare bones CD-ROM installation media.

[pi_rules]

If you've ever tried downloading a Debian .iso and install off if you'll find that they intentionally do not provice .iso images to save on bandwidth. However, making 12-16 floppies with all the possible drivers on it was something I was -not- going to do.

For my first 2.2. installation I put the drivers.tgs and the base2_2.tgz on my existing windows partition then just used the boot/root disks to do the install. This was nice; and I did something similar on two machines which were shipped to me w/ a RedHat installation on them.

But... what do you do when you don't have an existing OS on there? After some thinking I put together my own .iso that had nothing but the boot * root floppies, base2_2.tgz, and drivers.tgz, burned it to disk and viola. All I needed now was my CD, two floppy disks and I could do a 'net install just fine. If I ever got adventurous I'd have actually made the CD bootable and put the root FS on it but quite frankly It's only once every month or so that I have to do an install so finding the floppies isn't a big deal.

How 'bout it Debian team... a ~20MB .iso image for download, burn to disc, and have all the tools to do a 'net install off of it? Made my life pretty simple; wouldn't take more than a day to smash together I'd imagine either.

Justin Buist

Re:Do Not Fix What Isn't Broken

[Teancom]

Excuse me? "...debian is the only perfect destribution"??!? I've been using debian for a few years now (1.x days) and love it to death. But *perfect*? Apart from the various bugs and glitches from packages, the fact that I have to run unstable just to have a decent desktop (kde2.2.2) is *wrong*. And don't get me started on "testing" and how b0rked up that normally is (i'm 0 for 3 in trying to get a working testing system). Talk to Ivan Moore if you want a good rant on how people shouldn't be using testing for real workstations. Getting locked into cyclical traps of "this package depends on that one, but conflicts with another with depends on yet another which conflicts with.." is too common to be ignored. I shouldn't have to use dpkg to clear up messes like that, but I do. I'm a sysad at a company that is looking to switch to linux, and all I need to convince them to go with debian is come up with an automated installer. You'll notice that in the interview, they cover that: it's slated for the release *after* woody. I.e., all we need to do is wait for a year. And don't point me to FAI. It's nice, but I don't want to have to write my own installer, which is basically what you do with it. Mandrake "records" my choices, makes a floppy, and off I go. Don't get me wrong, I use debian for my personal workstation, but we're rolling out mandrake everywhere else...

Anyways, if debian is "perfect", as in it fits your needs with no complaint, more power to you. But for the rest of us, we appreciate the developer's hard work in trying to make a *really* good distrobution even better...

Installing X is Broken

[TheAJofOZ]

I quite like the Debian installer as well, however it suffers from the same problem that all Linux installers seem to - it doesn't consistently get X configuration right. For a server that's not a problem, for a desktop machine it is. Support for graphics cards, monitors, input devices etc in XFree86 seems to be pretty good now, but configuring it is still a nightmare. Installers (or better X) need to automatically detect the settings required and just work.

In fact, that's probably the biggest reason Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Once you get a system set up and configured right, it's fairly easy to use, particularly with KDE and GNOME these days, but if you can't get your system to that point then it's all for naught. Remember that not everyone has a local geek and Linux pretty much never comes preinstalled.

Good analogy

[roystgnr]

It's also the first thing you notice when you're checking out a new distro, and it's the only thing at all that shallow reviewers pay any attention to.

Option for experienced users?

[sammy.lost-angel.com]

A lot of debian users are very comfortable with debian's installer as it is. Most debian users I know, install just the basic OS, then use dselect to install the packages of their liking. Very minimal and effective. Will this option still be around for us experienced users?

Re:Graphical installer?

[psamuels]

In other words, we'll see a graphical Debian installer around 2010 or so?

Yeah, they do have long release cycles, but why exactly do you want a graphical installer anyway?

I've never quite understood this point. Bringing up the GUI early in the install process adds a bunch of complexity and failure cases, and to my mind anyway, doesn't really add any functionality.

What features of an installer do you have in mind that can be accomplished within a GUI but not with a text-based UI? And don't say "to impress people who confuse pretty with advanced" - why the **** should we care about their opinions?

One thing might be "to fit a reasonable amount of information on one screen" - which is why I boot with "vga=1" meaning 80x50 cells, and I think this should be made the default on boot-floppies, although I understand why it isn't (it would screw over those .001% of users that don't have VGA-compatible video cards or BIOSes).

This is like those BIOS setup screens that come with icon boxes, scroll bars and PS/2 mouse support. Does anyone find them easier to use than the venerable text-based BIOS setup screens? I don't. I find them confusing. Easy-to-use does not imply graphical, or vice versa.