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Debian Hardware

First Look at Debian's Next Generation Installer 454

Posted by CowboyNeal from the oohs-and-aahs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over at LinMagAu There is an interesting look at the new beta version of the Next Gerneration Debian Installer. Putting aside the fuss around Ian Murdock, Progeny and Anaconda, this is how Debian is constructing the future of what is known to be it's Achilles heel. It's a well done beginning." While still not a graphical installer (and the article does a good job of explaining why that's not a priority) the installer now autodetects hardware, streamlining module selection, which was previously one of the more confusing parts of the install for newbies.
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First Look at Debian's Next Generation Installer More

First Look at Debian's Next Generation Installer

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  • It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bsharitt ( 580506 ) <(moc.ttirahs) (ta) (tegdirb)> on Saturday November 15, 2003 @11:54AM (#7481218) Journal
    I don't really care about a pretty install, I'm just glad they finally got hardware detection.

    • Re:It's about time (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CentrX ( 50629 )
      To be fair, the only time most people ever need to even insert any hardware modules for the install is to install a single network card driver. The modules for the rest of a person's hardware are generally loaded by the kernel after installation.

    • Want a Debian installer w/hardware detection? (Score:4, Informative)

      by pegr ( 46683 ) * on Saturday November 15, 2003 @07:44PM (#7483494) Homepage Journal
      It's called Knoppix...

  • Graphical? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yoshi_mon ( 172895 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @11:55AM (#7481226)
    While still not a graphical installer (and the article does a good job of explaining why that's not a priority)...

    Who ever said we needed a graphical installer? There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer. And for installing small footprint it's always best.

    And besides, this is the logical progression. First you do the text installer, then you move on to a graphical installer if you so desire. Not the other way around.

    • Re:Graphical? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Saturday November 15, 2003 @11:57AM (#7481235) Homepage Journal
      Amen brother! FreeBSD still uses a text mode installer, and I have to say that I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Not sure about XP, but even Windows NT/2000 does the initial install from a Curses-like interface.

      • Re:Graphical? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:27PM (#7481371) Journal
        I run FreeBSD on two boxes, neither of which has a screen or keyboard. When I installed them, I did so using a serial console. The only improvement to the FreeBSD installer I would like to see is the ability to run it over an ssh session (since serial ports are becomming less common). A graphical installer would add nothing for me.

        In general, I feel graphical installers for operating systems are a bad idea, since you really should not be installing an OS unless you know what you're doing. The FreeBSD text installer has the advantage of being easy to use while still looking intimidating to the kind of person who shouldn't really be installing an OS, and encouraging them to either get help or read the documentation.

      • even Windows NT/2000 does the initial install from a Curses-like interface.

        And there are plenty of 'curses' in the later parts of the install too :-)
        • Aye, when you try to boot another partition and find out that not only has 'Doze installer wiped out your boot loader, it rendered your other partitions unbootable!
          Boo, boo, boo!

      • Re:Graphical? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by swb ( 14022 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:55PM (#7481488)
        Text mode installers are fine, but Sysinstall (FreeBSD's) ain't that great.

        The user interface isn't terribly consistant or easy to navigate, although it may be curses fault as much as FreeBSD's. It's also a major fuckaround if it fails someplace -- there's no recovering, despite the fact that the installer sticks around.

        Personally I think it needs major rework to improve the UI. I'd like to see fewer seperate screens and more expandable hierarchical menus. They do seem to be kind of stuck on the two-floppy size limitation, which I'm not sure makes much sense anymore outside of die-hards that insist on doing floppy-started network installations.

        I'd also like to see it capable of doing installations for network booted systems. This might seems contradictory, but think of an installer you run on the master system that lets you fill in the blanks and generate an image for bootable floppy or .iso that would then be net bootable, or on the net-booted system itself if the HDD was to be the boot source.

        While it's been a usable install screen, it could use some UI and functionality help, all of which would require ditching the 2.88MB barrier.

      • Re:Graphical? (Score:3, Informative)

        by peter_gzowski ( 465076 )
        WinXP still has the curses-like insterface as well. I get this all the time from friends I'm trying to convert, "why doesn't Linux have a nice installer like Windows XP?" I tell them that the Windows XP SETUP is not the Windows XP INSTALLER.

    • Re:Graphical? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BHearsum ( 325814 )
      I completely agree. The debian installer is the only one that has never failed me. It's simple, fast, and efficient. I can install a debian system in about 10 minutes flat from the standard or XFS boot disk. (That includes the time it takes for me to download the initial packages).

      Don't fuck with perfection.

    • Logical progression? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:13PM (#7481299)
      I don't really see the logic. Linux in general used to get beat up severly because of installation difficulties. Over the years many distros heard these complaints and addressed them by developing better and better installers. Today, there are numerous distros available that have such excellent installers that installation is a moot topic, except for Debian, Slack and Gentoo.

      Most, if not all, of these better installers are open source GPLed programs. It seems to me that "logical progression" would be Debian taking one or many of these better installers and adapting them to Debian. Instead they choose to reinvent the wheel and have produced a crude installer whose interface was passe years ago. Where is the logic?

      • Re:Logical progression? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:17PM (#7481320) Homepage
        Good theory, but the article explains why it doesn't work in practice: Debian has to be installable on 11 different architectures, and they have gone for a lowest common denominator approach (instead of, say, having a different, graphical install for x86 and maybe ppc).

        I agree with other comments. I can do without the graphics, but it's nice to whip through hardware detection without opening another console and digging through /proc.

      • Re:Logical progression? (Score:5, Informative)

        by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:26PM (#7481370)
        Debian's installer has to work across at least 11 different arches. It has to be endian clean and work equally well on 32 and 64 bit architectures. It must also be able to cope with http, ftp, and cdrom installs. Last but not least, there is the multitude of Debian packages and the categories they come in.

        It was probably easier to write something from scratch than adapt say RedHat's installer to meet those requirements. It also doesn't sound as crude as your making it out to be. This installer has hardware detection and automatic module configuration. A pretty front-end can be wrapped around it and the article says that experimental gtk installers based on it already exist. A multi-arch installer is Not Easy.
        • "It was probably easier to write something from scratch than adapt say RedHat's installer to meet those requirements. It also doesn't sound as crude as your making it out to be. This installer has hardware detection and automatic module configuration. "

          Implement the equivalent of latebinding for the installer. The bootable CD/DISK need only know how to get a base FS structure setup with a kernel+network driver and basic userland + rest of the installer. Stage 2 (located on a harddrive with network access

      • Re:Logical progression? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by the uNF cola ( 657200 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @01:11PM (#7481544)
        Installation difficulties != graphical installer. Installation difficulties are due to a bad user interface.

        OpenBSD has a great installer for the tecnically inclined, while dselect is just plain annoying. You have so many keys to remember just to select stuff, and the screen's view keeps changing.

        Redhat's text mode interface is quite nice, 'cept it doesn't provide all the right questions or choices all the time. If i select something and its dependencies aren't met, it should ask me right away, "Do I want to add this or forget about my selection." I shouldn't have to think, I selected some packages before, and these are the missing dependencies over all of them, now I can go back and guess which ones i fooked up on.

        The autodetect and what not is important too, getting rid of stupid questions like, "do you have a 3 button mouse." If there was a way it could figure it out, do it damnit. And this project at LEAST strives for the autodetection. Hopefully, it'd streamline the package selection process and what not.

    • it's not only the best, it might be the only options; serialconsole is really hard if the installer depends on using graphics for something so simple as installing an os (!).
      The installer, especially if made even more automagical should remain textbased.

    • Re:Graphical? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:15PM (#7481305) Homepage
      Who ever said we needed a graphical installer? There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer. And for installing small footprint it's always best.

      Average consumers. There's nothing *wrong* with a command prompt either, but they don't like that either. Neither the cryptic C:\> prompt in DOS nor [root@mypc root]# in Linux/Unix. That is, if you want Linux to be interesting to average consumers, but I'd say having a market share that'd at least make companies take Linux users into consideration would benefit all.

      And besides, this is the logical progression. First you do the text installer, then you move on to a graphical installer if you so desire. Not the other way around.

      Mostly true. But considering that just about everyone except those installing a headless server would prefer to use the GUI if there was one available, it's not exactly a small "add-on" for a small special interest group. Particularly if you ever hope to convert Microsoft "point-n-click for almost everything" powerusers...

      Kjella

      • Re:Graphical? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by iantri ( 687643 )
        Remember.. the installer isn't a command-line, its a TUI. Basically, a GUI done in text. Its not as bad as you'd think. And have you ever installed Windows 2000/XP? It uses a text-mode installer..
        • Now, I haven't clikced through it in a couple months, but I hardly remember setting more than *where* it was going in the text-mode UI. All the actual configuration (localization, components, network settings, additional drivers etc. are set from a GUI after first reboot. (Unless you need them to load a 3rd party driver to for SCSI or RAID).

          Anyway, on the Linux side I can only compare it to the RedHat installer, which I think was quite nice. Since the article is slashdotted, I don't know more about Debian'

      • Re:Graphical? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by evilquaker ( 35963 )
        yoshi_mon: Who ever said we needed a graphical installer? There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer. And for installing small footprint it's always best.

        Kjella: Average consumers

        "Average consumers" don't install operating systems. They get an OS pre-installed and never change (or probably even update) it.

        • "Average consumers" don't install operating systems. They get an OS pre-installed and never change (or probably even update) it.

          Have you never used Windows then? I always understood that a complete reinstall every couple of months was the only way to make the thing useable?

          Perhaps that makes me an 'expert' though?

      • Re:Graphical? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by qtp ( 461286 )
        Average consumers.

        "Average consumers" could care less if the install is "graphical" (I'll assume you mean "X11-based"), what "average consumers" want is an install that does everything itself without asking them very many questions, and I've yet to find one (including on Windows) that doesn't ask at least one question that your "average consumer" is unable to answer correctly the first time.

        What would be nice addition to the Debian installer is an ai that can look at your disk resources, ask if you want

    • Re:Graphical? (Score:4, Informative)

      by digime ( 681824 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:25PM (#7481365)

      Whether or not it's text-based won't really make a difference with this installer. I imagine you will have a choice of front-ends that all do the same thing when this moves out of beta. From the article:

      "...but due to its modular design the developers can stick almost any front-end on it they like. There are already test builds using a GTK (ie: Gnome-style) GUI with mouse-driven menus etc, and if you really wanted to you could build a front-end using anything from a Braille device to Macromedia Flash."

    • Re:Graphical? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bob9113 ( 14996 )
      There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer.

      Sorry to get in on this one late. You are absolutely correct, and just a hair short of the mark. A good command line interface (CLI) installer is better than a good gui installer. You can run a CLI installer on a VGA card, but have you ever tried to run a gui installer without a grahics card? If (and this may be a big if) the CLI and the GUI have all the same features (sensible help, wizards, etc), the only upside of GUI is the prettiness.

      A

  • Silent switch to Dvorak? (Score:5, Informative)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Saturday November 15, 2003 @11:57AM (#7481231) Journal
    Why does it silently switch to Dvorak when you select diff languages?

    "If you select "English (USA)" you'll be safe, but be warned that if you choose "English (Australia)" or "English (United Kingdom)" your keyboard will switch to the Dvorak layout! Not quite what most people expect."

  • A good graphical installer... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ca1v1n ( 135902 ) <snook.guanotronic@com> on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:03PM (#7481254)
    A good installer for a vanilla desktop user would take advantage of all the hardware on their system. It should detect your sound card, and then play a sound that says "hey, we found your sound card!" and it should let you use your USB mouse, show all this stuff on your display in such a fashion that acknowledges the existence of the video card, etc.

    Basically, it should be more like Knoppix.

    Now, I wouldn't want to lock the user, who may not be a vanilla desktop user and may not even have a mouse or video card on the machine, into this setup, but it sure would be nice to have the option, wouldn't it?

    Knoppix is wonderful and all, but it leaves behind some artifacts of the live CD setup that can make package upgrades (which users ought to be able to do graphically, and with little pain) very painful. If we could get stuff like this in the base Debian distribution, we'd be a lot closer to Debian being sufficiently user-friendly that we could hand a disc to grandma without fear.

    *prepares for the "get redhat" flames*
    • > *prepares for the "get redhat" flames*

      Try "RTFA". They state that the installer needs to work for every type of screen output from a GeForceFX to a serial cable. Being that the serial cable is the lowest common denominator that they had to support, they designed the installer as a simple text mode interface.
    • **Basically, it should be more like Knoppix.**

      if you want to install debian from knoppix like installer.. .. why don't you like, eh,... .. get knoppix? knx-hdinstall from there then?

      sure it's not that well shouted all over the place but it's there.
    • Actually, more like "Get Mandrake"

      As much as I love Debian, it used to be my flavour of choice until I got tired of the poor hardware support (now over to Gentoo), if I want to hand a disc to Grandma (and I actually had to, or almost, since I wanted to introduce my comp-savvy but MS-loving Grandpa to Linux), I'll choose Mandrake.

      The other day I found an old pic of me tearing the wrapping off Mandrake 7.2, which was a refreshing change from Redhat (popped my cherry on Redhat 5.*)... Even though I always pr

      • Re:A good graphical installer... (Score:5, Funny)

        by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:52PM (#7481471)
        The other day I found an old pic of me tearing the wrapping off Mandrake 7.2, which was a refreshing change...

        You take pictures of yourself unwraping the latest Linux distro? My GOD man, you are a ture Geek! /chants/ We're not worthy, we're not worthy.....

      • I've always admired the user friendliness of Mandrake

        I quite liked it as well, until the bug-ridden mess that was Mandrake 9.

        far before Redhat turned into a bloatfest

        You don't *have* to install it all, you know. The installer lets you choose what you install and what you leave off.

        Personally, I'll miss the quality and reliability of the basic RedHat distro, and I've no idea what I'll use in its place. Fedora certainly doesn't appear to be there yet.

  • It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fux the Penguin ( 724045 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:04PM (#7481259) Journal
    Personally, I've never had good luck with Debian. I know lots of people love it, and bully for them, but I have never been able to get a Debian system up and running to my satisfaction. I believed this was a personal failure until I succeeded two times with Gentoo, which is to Debian as Alaska is to Montana, in terms of frontier cred. Anyway, I agree that things that are dumb about the Debian installer could be improved, but I'm still a little worried that an installer my mama could run isn't right around the corner...

    As everyone knows, Debian is maintained by an organization of volunteers. When people working on the distribution support users, it takes away from the time that they could be spending to improve the distribution. Therefore, it makes sense for them to not make Debian open for anybody to install. If someone can't make it through an installer that requires some attention and knowledge on the part of the user, then they should probably be using a commercial distribution that offers support for money or whatever. That's one of the things I like best about Gentoo's root shell installer. It immediately gets rid of people that are intimidated by that sort of thing, and prevents them from sucking up tons of attention on mailing lists or forums. The difficulty of the installer should be like those little signs in front of rides at amusement parks: "You must be this tall to ride."

    The target audience of Debian doesn't need a graphical installer, so there's really no reason to put one in. If you want the easy graphical installer, perhaps you should ask yourself why you chose Debian in the first place. Besides, with distributions like Debian and Gentoo, using the installer is more likely than not a one time thing, because you can upgrade the version of your operating system without bothering with the installer. I'm all for installer improvements that save time for the core users of a distribution, but revising the installer to open the distribution to a new class of users should not be entered into lightly

    • Re:It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)

      by awgriff279 ( 624548 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:25PM (#7481364) Homepage
      I can think of one good reason for Linux to have an easier installation process. I've wanted to switch from Windows for several years now. However, not having any Linux experience makes a proper installation very complicated. Consequently, I'm still using Windows until I have time to figure everything out. Unfortunartely, it's hard to learn about an OS when one doesn't have it to use. I love the idea of Linux, but until the learning curve drops on a free version, I'll probably keep using WIN98se.
      • Redhat 9 has a very simple install and incredible hardware detection that blows windows away.

        99% of the time the only thing you'll have to setup after install is 3d acceleration for your video card if it's an ati or nvidia card.

        Don't listen to all these mandrake pushers, when you get done with the install the system will be broken and the configuration applets won't work right. Go out and get ya rh9 and save yourself the headaches :)
      • Grab a RedHat or Mandrake ISO and start playing. Installation is a quick and easy.
      • He never said that Linux shouldn't have an easier installation process. Just that Debian shouldn't have an easier installation process. The Redhat installation is already easier, IMO, than a Windows 2000 installation.

      • The LibraNet Debian installer is about as simple as you can reasonably get. And no, your mother shouldn't use it. She probably COULD, but she'd be likely to make some rather poor choices. Most of the defaults are sensible, but there are a few places where if you don't choose exit you would get stuck in a loop.

        Now I'll admit that it's not a pretty graphics screen. It's largely text mode. But if you read the words things are quite clear. OTOH, if you just hit the enter key, things don't always work the
    • Your failure to do a Debian install is hardly a personal failure. I'm as good at installing Operating Systems as just about anybody. I've done some really hairy installs like Xenix on a TRS-80 and OpenBSD on a Dec/MIPS workstation. I've even done a number of successfull installs with older versions of Debian. While I eventually succeeded at installing a recent version debian on each of the four computers I regularly use, it never was easy, and usually required me to take at least one heroic measure, and

    • When people working on the distribution support users, it takes away from the time that they could be spending to improve the distribution. Therefore, it makes sense for them to not make Debian open for anybody to install.

      Bullshit.

      More users ==> more bug reports ==> more things fixed ==> improved distribution.

      Debian's installer isn't actively kept down; anyone can become a contributor and make it better. I'd say that a lot of the "problem" is that Debian tends to be reinstalled much less often

  • Installer with My Hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by idonotexist ( 450877 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:05PM (#7481264)
    I prefer to go through the difficult installation process Debian is known for - I know what hardware I have and can update drivers in the kernel if necessary, manually. So has does an installer perform? How about detecting a p4p800 deluxe motherboard with a 3com 3C940 nic? Unfortunately not. The disadvantage with installer is that users generally become lazy because of the very nature of an installer. It's purpose is to automatically detect a user's hardware - if it does not, then a user will likely give up and not naturally, say, update a drive in the kernel.

    • Re:Installer with My Hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:56PM (#7481491) Homepage
      I prefer to go through the difficult installation process Debian is known for - I know what hardware I have and can update drivers in the kernel if necessary, manually. ... The disadvantage with installer is that users generally become lazy because of the very nature of an installer.

      Lazy, hell. You don't really believe this, do you?

      I don't go to every machine I manage, I use shell scripts. When the machine boots, init configures the system. Hardware configuration is part of the entire scheme. If it fails, the user (not an admin) should then get someone else to fix it as it's not thier job to know how. If the hardware configuration software is worth it, there should be few situations where it does indeed fail. Kudzu (Red Hat's) is damn good. If the Debian folks want to reinvent the wheel, they can.

      Getting the proper modules loaded automatically is exactly the kind of task that software does well. Looking up hardware details and slogging through kernel notes is an entirely automatable process...and automation is why we have computers in the first place.

      I used to fiddle around with modules every time I upgraded the kernel -- either from source or from a new distribution. Kudzu (also used in Knoppix BTW) does an amazing job of auto configuration...so why not use it or something like it?

      1. Would you use a boot CD like Knoppix if you had to configure the modules and other drivers each time you went to a new machine? It would take the joy out of it, making you do the work a computer is entirely capable of doing.

      It doesn't make you any less special that the system figures out something that you also can figure out. Yes, experts should know how the system works. Tinker with modules.conf if you like. I personally would like to fiddle with other things beyond the base hardware configuration since I already know how it works.

      That said, if you're a professional let me put in a plug for InstallBase [sourceforge.net]. This is a TK-based, cross-platform installation program; Solaris, Windows, and Linux. It provides a good balence between simple and detailed configuration, as well as a silent mode. Currently, I'm using it to bring sanity and automation to a mismanaged network.

      Here's something you likely agree with. The network management document I'm writing says -- up front -- installation is not running an install program. I'm a strong believer that If you don't know what the answer should be, using a computer to tell you is an act of trust in something that has proven itself untrustworthy; it is foolish.

      InstallBase (the tool) is used becuase it meets the goal of automation, though to use it or any other tool properly you have to know exactly what it is you want it to do. That takes concerned effort. The result eliminates needless work and inconsistant human mistakes that happen when each machine is managed a little differently. (If done wrong, you get consistant mistakes...so, there you go!)

    • The disadvantage with installer is that users generally become lazy because of the very nature of an installer. It's purpose is to automatically detect a user's hardware - if it does not, then a user will likely give up and not naturally, say, update a drive in the kernel.

      I'll take the most ridiculous part of that statement first... there's nothing natural about knowing how to update a driver in the kernel. Maybe it's a as natural as to clean the spark plugs for an auto mechanic, but in both cases you it
    • So in otherwords you like bending yourself over backwards to do tasks that could easily be automated.

      Keep in mind, this is for the initial installation. Most people like the system to be up and running after an install, not partially functioning with a pile of kernel modules that need to be downloaded and compiled (like I was last time I tried Debian.)

      The USER wants to use their system. They shouldn't have to manually configure every little bit of the OS just to get it useable. No other OS forces this (no
    • Gentoo has a particularly difficult installation process that entails selecting compile optimization options from a set of dozens, setting processor optimizations, choosing which kernel sources to use and compiling a kernel, all in a chroot environment. This is for the simple Stage 3 install, Stages 1 and 2 are worse. It's been a long while since I tried but I still found the Debian process obtuse in comparison. The difference was documentation, not laziness. Gentoo's is very straightforward and linear. Act
  • just few weeks(2? or something) ago when i installed debian on the machine sitting next to this. to be frank apart from the bootup screen i didn't see anything new in it compared to my memories of the previous installers, except maybe some minor differences. it's been easy enough for years if you figure out the fact that most of the time you really want to do a netinstall and not install from the cd's. the package selecting might be the problem,though imho dselect isn't that bad if you'd just take time to r
  • Is it really necessary?
    I mean, once you install a "server" operating system using a generic kernel, then go and recompile the kernel to include support for whatever hardware you have in your server.
    What exactly is the purpose of hardware detection in this case? You won't be using X11, USB, or any of that stuff that needs to be "detected" on a server, and by installing Linux in the first place you accept the responsibility that you know what you are doing.

    Or is this no longer the case?
    • What exactly is the purpose of hardware detection in this case?


      It's nice if the installer can see your hard drive, so that it has somewhere to install to.

    • I mean, once you install a "server" operating system using a generic kernel, then go and recompile the kernel to include support for whatever hardware you have in your server.

      What exactly is the purpose of hardware detection in this case? You won't be using X11, USB, or any of that stuff that needs to be "detected" on a server, and by installing Linux in the first place you accept the responsibility that you know what you are doing.

      Not everyone uses linux for just servers. And even on servers, installin
    • My servers have all sorts of hardware that I want supported. My servers have NIC cards, video cards, SCSI cards, RAID Array controllers, Fibre Channel controllers, integrated out of band management controllers, hot-plug PCI controllers, and more. I really like it when the installer detects these and loads the modules for me rather than having to do it manually or recompiling the kernel.

  • Reinventing the wheel.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spectrokid ( 660550 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:13PM (#7481298) Homepage
    I don't want to be a troll, but I thought the whole idea about open source is you can copy from each other and not reinvent the wheel. If Mandrake has a really good hardware detection, then why are these dudes writing something from scratch?
    • probably because mandrake has lousy hardware detection. so they based it on redhat instead ;)
    • b/c Mandrake runs only on i386 while Debian supports 11 architectures? Which has always been the only reason for the state of the Debian installer anyway
      • There is a Mandrake for PowerPC. It is stuck at 9.1 while the i386 version is at 9.2, but that's not a major problem. When Mandrake goes to v.10 there will be a new PPC version out. I haven't used it...my Wallstreet PowerBook runs Yellow Dog. But from what I have heard it's as brain-dead easy as MDK i386.
        • PPC is easy, it's almost the same as x86 hardware wise. But what about sparc64? Some sparc64 boxes don't even have PCI busses, do you think MDK has any idea how to detect hardware on SBus?

  • I tried it... (Score:3, Informative)

    by perotbot ( 632237 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:18PM (#7481330) Journal
    it works, if you stick with woody, it's pretty much a "hit enter" proposition. It's not as good as libranet or knoppix/gnoppix/morphix. But given the "Debian Mindset" it is a step forward.

  • Mirrored... poor poor dead server... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:20PM (#7481346)
    First Look: Next-Generation Debian Installer

    The Debian installer has been considered its Achilles heel for a long time, but in the last couple of months things have really been heating up in Debian-installer-land. Ian Murdock recently announced to the Debian project that Progeny, the Debian-based distro that created the Progeny Graphical Installer, was dropping PGI in favour of porting Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian. But things haven't been sitting still within Debian itself either, with frantic work over the last couple of months to get the next-generation Debian Installer to the point where Sarge (Debian 3.1) can be released.

    A Debian-Installer Debcamp in Germany in September saw many of the core developers get together for several days of intensive coding, with the result that Beta 1 of the new installer is now ready for the world to come and gawk, and poke, and kick the tyres, and even take it for a spin around the block. It's still changing on a daily basis but the developers want as many people as possible to give it a whirl and report back any problems they have.

    So, for your edutainment and complete with pretty pictures, I present to you this first look at the next-generation Debian Installer.
    Installer Rationale

    To understand some of the design decisions that have been made with respect to the installer and why it's taken so long to get to this point, it's important to know a little about the Debian project itself. For many people this section will be rehashing old ground so if you just want to get to the guts of it skip ahead now to the next section, "Getting The Installer".

    The long and the short of it is that Debian is committed to supporting multiple processor architectures. It's famous for being the most broadly deployable Linux distro (and possibly operating system) in existence, running on at least 11 distinct architectures. Nobody has more expertise in porting software to different platforms than the Debian project.

    While that causes some problems when distributing normal user-space software, they're difficulties that can be worked around: for example, a package written in C needs to compile on all 11 architectures, but not all architectures use the same C libraries. No problem, Debian's server farm just autobuilds the package with different libraries for each platform.

    When it comes to an installer, though, things are different. An installer needs to be bootable on all platforms, but different platforms boot in totally different ways. x86 systems start up and look for local disks in a certain way, Power Macintosh systems do it another way, and S/390 is different again. Then consider that the job of an installer is to figure out what local hardware you have available and setting up the system in a way that will work on that hardware. How does it detect the hardware? Will a detection system that works on one architecture fail horribly on another?

    Probably.

    But it gets worse: think about what happens when you first launch an installer. It boots up and displays some stuff on screen, right? But some machines use an AGP or PCI graphics subsystem, while others may not have a graphics subsystem at all, only a serial interface with a character-based console. What should the installer do if it starts up and finds the host system doesn't even have a graphics card installed?

    The more you think about questions like that, the more it'll bake your noodle when you consider the task faced by the Debian Installer team.

    In essence, they are trying to make a universal installer that will run on any architecture with any hardware detection method and any display system.

    So people may bitch and moan about how it's taken so long for Debian to produce a "pretty" installer while other distros have had one for years, or they may say that Debian should just adopt a third-party installer like PGI or Anaconda, but that doesn't really take the big picture into account. Debian's mantra is to be the Universal Operating System, a

  • What Debian needs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Espectr0 ( 577637 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:26PM (#7481367) Journal
    -Fork for architectures: i know lots of people don't like to wait for upgraded packages because they break on different architectures. This is what's happenning with xfree 4.3 not being available. If there were a debian-x86 fork, it would use optimization and wouldn't be behind other distros in package versions.

    -Dselect needs to be sent to /dev/null. The debian installer was never the problem. It isn't harder than slackware, but dselect really, really sucks.

    -Loose the restrictions a little bit: why mplayer is missing and xine not? Mplayer has been 100% gpl since 0.9 and it was rejected from getting a package because of ffmpeg, which xine also has.

    -More customization: the USE variable of Gentoo is really powerful, and it would be great when apt getting source packages. I want package X, and it wants me to install package Y that is optional and i dont want.

    -Updated versions! Slackware is current, and it's stable.

    -Re-do the stable, testing and unstable package list: they should only contain base, critical packages. So i want to run the latest kde with my stable setup? Is kde 2.2 more stable than 3.1? The security bugs fixed between them say no (yeah, i know they backport, but those packages never get the same QA) User-level desktop apps which aren't critical shouldn't be restricted in the same stable, testing and unstable trees, or at least they could mix and match.

    And lot of other things i can't remember...
    • Fork for architectures

      I agree. All the users of exotic archs could very well stick with the version they already have. Or use NetBSD or whatever.

      Also, I think that a source-based distribution would be better for non-mainstream architectures. Architectures that matter in this day and age are i386, AMD64, IA64 and PPC.

    • Re:What Debian needs (Score:5, Informative)

      by Varitek ( 210013 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @01:26PM (#7481622)
      Fork for architectures: i know lots of people don't like to wait for upgraded packages because they break on different architectures. This is what's happenning with xfree 4.3 not being available. If there were a debian-x86 fork, it would use optimization and wouldn't be behind other distros in package versions.

      Well, first of all, XFree 4.3 is available. I've been using it on Debian for ages - you just neet to add a Debian Experimental line to your sources.list Secondly, getting software to work on many architectures usually involves fixing bugs and poor assumptions. The many architectures of Debian helps QA, rather than hinder it, even if it does take longer. As far as dselect goes, I've been running Debian for 3 years now, and I used dselect exactly once - my first install. You're not forced to use it in any way.
      do the stable, testing and unstable package list: they should only contain base, critical packages. So i want to run the latest kde with my stable setup? Is kde 2.2 more stable than 3.1?

      Stable doesn't just mean it doesn't crash. It means it doesn't *change*. That's the point of the stable install. You know that installing the security packages won't introduce some behaviour that you weren't expecting, which a lot of people think is damned important.
      Updated versions! Slackware is current, and it's stable.

      New versions of software are by definition unstable. Things change, configs become out of date, new libraries are needed. If you don't mind those things, use Debian Unstable. Its packages are not only up-to-date, but they're also damned good quality.
      • I think that testing is generally a better choice than unstable. I prefer testing with selected packages from unstable...but I never leave the unstable line uncommented through an apt-get upgrade.

    • > -Fork for architectures

      Multiple architecture are a good way to make sure that everything is kept clean and generalized. Architecture specific hacks are not acceptable and that's good for everyone. So even thought I only a couple of time used Debian on something other than i386, I think multiple architectures are good for Debian.

      > -Dselect needs to be sent to /dev/null

      That is you opinion, but I happen to like dselect very much. If you do not like it, you are free to use aptitude or tasksel.

      > -
  • The main problem I had with the Debian installation process was their specification of what should be included in "installation".

    Debian install includes setting up the refresh rate of your monitor, for example. This can't always be autodetected reliably, and the Debian install has always made a bad choice for me (usually too low a refresh rate, because the install picks the maximum possible resolution). You can fix this, but you have to be willing to dig and (horrors!) think.

    The right thing to do is what
    • The right thing to do is what Windows has always done: make it easy to change.

      XFree 4.3 has an extension called randr that allows changing resolution and vertical refresh on the fly, and the latest versions of both Gnome and KDE now include control panel applets for setting resolution and refresh rate. How long it will take for that to trickle down into Debian stable is anyone's guess, but the Linux community at large is already there.

  • Not just for newbies... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:41PM (#7481423)
    While still not a graphical installer (and the article does a good job of explaining why that's not a priority) the installer now autodetects hardware, streamlining module selection, which was previously one of the more confusing parts of the install for newbies.

    While seleting modules by hand may not be confusing for non-newbies, it's still annoying. Sure, I know exactly which modules I need, and I could select them all by hand, but I shouldn't have to. One of the great things about RedHat's installer (I know, I know, RedHat is dead) is the kickstart option. I can put in a disk, kickstart a net install, take the disk out, and move on. And barring any unusual hardware, I'll come back to a fully installed system. This is great for bulk-installing machines.

    I'm glad to see Debian has moved closer to this goal by doing module auto-detection.

  • The authors need a little perspective. From the story:

    Nobody has more expertise in porting software to different platforms than the Debian project.

    They also state that it may be the most broadly deployable OS in existance because it runs on 11 architectures. No mean feat, I'm sure. But others run on more platforms [netbsd.org]. At least 17 CPU architectures and who knows how many "platforms" :-) Still, I'm excited about this new installer and can't wait to see if/how PGI integrates with it. Apart from this small (an

  • what debian currently has... but this does not seem 'next generation' it looks so last century...

    All the others have GUI's which, believe it or not alot of people really really like. Easy that a monkey could do it. This doesn't look that easy.

  • Everyone on here is bitching away how the Debian 'installer' sucks. I think what you mean is their old installer sucked ass. How can you call this one shity, when it has everything but pretty pictures? Text is nice, and I for one don't need a picture for everything while I install a system. How can you say its only up to 'redhat 7' when it has everything redhat9.2 has and more. Realize that this is a new installer, this story is not called 'Lets bitch about the 'installer' and assume it still sucks like
  • I'm personally moving all of my servers from SuSE 7.3-8.2 to Debian. For server installs I don't care about GUI. The Debian install worked great when I started with the 2.4 kernel and it detected my compaq smart array 3200 controller.

    However, an average desktop user needs a graphical install. Maybe not through debian though... I mean maybe debian becomes the server/power user version and knoppix becomes the desktop install for the average computer user.

    That being said, knoppix's hardware detection locks u
    • However, an average desktop user needs a graphical install.

      Is the average desktop user even going to be able to tell the difference between graphics mode and text moed with curses(-like) menus?

  • Hard Disk Partitioning / LILO Install (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AELinuxGuy ( 588522 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @01:19PM (#7481593)
    For me anyway, the most difficult part of setting up Debian has been the uncertainty in the disk partitioning / Lilo setup. Unfortunately, these screenshots do not show much of a change in that area. As the author suggests, some sort of "automatic partitioning" like Anaconda does would be a nice addition.

    On another front, is there any reason why the installer cannot let you choose in between GRUB and LILO like Anaconda does?

  • Knoppix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @01:53PM (#7481771)
    The easiest Debian installer is Knoppix.

    You boot from a Knoppix CD, and all you have to do is install a base system and apt to your hard disk, and you've got a Debian system that's already configured.

    They should acknowledge this fact and officially support Knoppix as an install method for desktop users. Then they can still focus their installer on people who want to install Debian on an Alpha over their serial line.

  • Debian already has a great graphical installer... (Score:3, Informative)

    by adrianbaugh ( 696007 ) on Saturday November 15, 2003 @04:06PM (#7482458) Homepage Journal
    It's called "a KNOPPIX CD". Fire it up, type "su knoppix-install", choose "debian system", and sit back and enjoy. The only enhancement they probably ought to make is to have a prominent menu-item for this feature.

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