A Better Installer for Debian?

F1re writes "Linux User mag in Germany has decided to include Debian on the mag and wants to make a more user friendly installer. They are looking for help from Debian developers. More info here Linux User"

DrakX?

[leviramsey]

Mandrake's installer is GPL. It shouldn't be too exceptionally difficult to port it to Debian...

There is one - PGI

[trh]

Progeny Debian Linux was a GREAT distribution, when it existed. It had great hardware detection, a very simple installer and some other features. Some of the best parts of it are now available.

You can use Progeny Graphical Installer (PGI) to install a nice Woody release, or download the package and create your OWN customized installer with it. This thing is GREAT. Check it out - they are pushing hard towards the 1.0 release.

http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/

It is very nice, and has a text-mode and X-based installer (you can even do the X install remotely on another machine). This thing is great, and I use it for all of my installs right now. Thanks, Branden Robinson and team for keeping this great part of Progeny Debian Linux alive...

No No No!

[Tryfen]

I think that the basic point is being missed.

From the article
Right now what we'd be most interested in is some feedback by Debian developers and users out there

The golden rule in HCI is "Developers are not target users". Sad as it may seem for some people Linux Developers are no longer the same people as Linux Users. This means that, by and large, interface designers should IGNORE THE DEVELOPERS!

Users are the ones that matter here. As a first time Linux installer I don't really care about most of the things a developer cares about.
I haven't installed Debian, but let me compare my last Linux install (Mandrake 8.something) to WinXP...

All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".
Mandrake wanted to know the intimate details of my network card, how much swap space I wanted, what make of scroll-mouse I had, what sound card I had, what video cards I had (and don't get me started on XFree's Multimon support!). All this does is serve to scare and confuse a Linux Virgin. And if you want Linux on the desktop you can either make the world smarter, or make your products smarter.

Debian should not be soliciting people in the know - they know far more than the average first time user and are, consequently, useless for developing interfaces for newbies.

Sorry for the rant/misspellling/smell.

T

Shouldn't be too hard...

[Bozar]

I recently switched from Redhat to Debian linux. I used the network install (because i have a fast connection) and i found that the most obscure part of the install was finding which NIC model i had (because they went by manufacturer code instead of human-readable names) If a prepackaged installer simply had something that detected your NIC automatically, with some simple instructions to read along with each install stage (easy ones found at www.linuxnewbie.org), then it would be a much less painful install. As a seperate note, something must be added to automatically configure USB optical mice, because as it is they are not (a huge pain for a user with limited skills).

dselect is already a good tool for choosing packages to install and seeing what is out there to install. Its interface could be improved somewhat (always going past help screens becomes a pain, and collapsable trees should be in to reduce clutter(and if they are already, why aren't they obvious))

This should put user-friendliness in, while maintaining most of the customization available in the regular install (after all, you could always ignore the advice...)

Misunderstanding

[CAIMLAS]

I'm sorry, but when did "I can click on it" equate user-friendlyness?

Debian's current default installer consists of a group of sub-menus with descriptive explainations of what task each menu item would perform.

If this is an arguement of asthetic or practicality, then it should be thrown out. The only way this arguement for a better Debian installer could possibly hold water is if we're talking about the detection of hardware, which is marginally frustrating (I had no problems the first time I installed debian).

Need a better pre-installer

[Greyfox]

What I'd really like to be able to do is to sit down at a fully installed Linux system and run a program that lets me specify out the hardware configuration of my system and the packages that I want to install on it. It should allow me to choose whether to install stable, testing or unstable. It should inquire whether I have a network connection I'm willing to install the system over. It should then compile a static kernel from my /usr/src/linux directory to my specification and build a bootable ISO image that I just need to boot on the target system to run the entire install. Ideally it would be robust enough that all I'd have to do is hand it to a user with the instructions, "Just boot this. It'll solve all your problems."

Are all distros for beginners?

[Publicus]

I use Debian, I absolutely love it. I don't think the installation process is that bad, but I should not fail to mention that I didn't get it right the first time I tried it.

Of course, it wasn't the first Linux distro that I installed. I started with Redhat 6.2. I got frusterated with that because I couldn't figure out how to compile a kernel in Redhat, and all of the docs I found that were Redhat specific said don't recompile your kernel unless you ABSOLUTELY know what you're doing.

Then I tried Mandrake, and after using that for awhile I managed to compile my first kernel, but I still wasn't completely happy because I found it hard to configure.

I tried Slackware, and oh did I like that. The config files in /etc were super easy to modify, but the package management system left a little to be desired.

This whole time I was learning, and becoming better at using a Linux OS. I was seeing the different types of packages out there, rpm, tgz, and the one I hadn't used yet, deb. So I had to give debian a try. Like I said, I didn't get it right the first time, although the installation is easier than Slackware. Once I did though, and I discovered apt-get, I was hooked. I now have three machines running woody and one running potato and I'll never switch to anything else.

It's not the distro for beginners. It doesn't have to be. It's a good distro, perhaps the best, and it's not for beginners. There is nothing wrong with that.

Debian needs an installer?

[aderuwe]

Once the base system is up and installed (including /etc/apt/sources.list), the best "installer" is

apt-get install [name of software I need] (repeat as needed for all your preferred applications)

It will get all dependencies and the like for you. Setting up the base system is not too hard and only a few questions need to be asked (timezone, partitioning, ...). That and "apt" is really the best installer available for any Linux distribution at this time, IMHO. I'd never use anything but Debian again.

The Installer Baffles Me

[waldoj]

Well, this is great to hear.

I built a new computer on Saturday, and I'd hoped to finally make the switch to Debian. Starting in 1994, I was a Slackware kind of guy. Somewhere in there I made the Red Hat transition. Starting about 8 months ago, I switched to Mandrake. Saturday, I was going to switch to Debian.

At least, that was the idea. The installer was less than descriptive. It failed to recognize my IBM Deskstar 40GB on a Promise RAID IDE controller -- both parts that are reportedly fine. At least, I think that it failed -- the error message was brief and undescriptive, without further recourse or details available. No problem, I thought, I'll do a net install. No such luck: it wouldn't recognize my 3Com Fast Etherlink. Not exactly a crazy off-brand of NIC. Not having any way to dump the terse error messages to a file, I did my best to memorize/scrawl the messages and Google for them, but that yielded no useful results.

With another installer (well, not Slack :), I would have tried a different class of installation, been given a more helpful error message...something. I can appreciate the concept of Debian being less-than-user-friendly. I can see how some people would like the inaccessibilty, to keep out the riff-raff. Maybe, on the basis of the fact that I couldn't properly work the installer, I am the riff-raff.

But, hey, Mandrake sure does work nice on this shiny new system.

-Waldo Jaquith

Friendly to which users?

[mwood]

Anyone who utters the phrase "user-friendly" ought to be required to define the word "user". Most of the stuff I've dealt with which was called "user-friendly" was actively hostile to the kind of user who's been herding computers for a quarter of a century and expects them to just do as they're told with no back-talk. I'm always asking vendors to make their software less user-friendly and more usable.

Let's hope that this doesn't lead Debian in the wrong direction.

I love the current installer!

[_aa_]

http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/d isks-i386/3.0.21-2002-03-19/images-1.44/bf2.4/ [debian.org] -- 2 floppies, network install, 10 minutes (depending on your bandwidth).

If you ask me, it can't get much better than that.

RE: Offtopic

[extrasolar]

I almost kick myself everytime I read one of these "re-inventing the wheel with open source" tidbits. I'm not sure what your experience is but it doesn't sound like you have a foot in the free software community.

Because it is a community and the community isn't hiring people from Universities with CS degrees, rather within the community people are learning to code. They are getting experience. Some of us are rather new to coding so you will see "Hello World" re-implemented thousands of times. You'll see hundreds of the most routine shell scripts. And you'll see dozens of IRC clients all from a different code base. Why?

Its part of the fun of computing. Honestly, it is less fun (IMO) to start from someone else's program than from starting from scratch--especially when someone else's program already has all the features you want. The beginning stages of a software project are probably the most exciting.

Of course there are other things. Like it is more difficult to grok a large code base than a smaller one. And sometimes more experienced coders pull tricks that newbies don't quite grok yet--so decide to use more simpler and apparent methods.

Free Software isn't going away and I think you're going to see a lot more of this. Programmers going through different stages of experience and writing software that demonstrates different levels of skill.

One thing I've noticed is that software is becomming more and more complex. We may see what I call generational programming. Basically, instead of one programmer understanding a code base or even an entire community understanding a code base we may get to the point where several generations are needed to understand and contribute to a code base (or it may be a conveniant excuse for the TUNES project :).