Debian Installer RC1 Is Out 212
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!"
Full RC1 torrents. (Score:5, Informative)
.. available at suprnova.org.
Debian 3.1 (Sarge) Release Candidate 1 - CD 1 of 12 [66.90.75.92] ...
Re:Full RC1 torrents. (Score:1, Insightful)
I would personally much rather see that torrent being hosted somewhere more official.
Only the hash needs to be official (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only the hash needs to be official (Score:1)
While no sane person who knows what they're doing would install an OS without first verifying data integrity, i think that virtually nobody will bother to d/l the sums separately and take that extra step.
Me, i'm just paranoid. I wonder how many others are, too?
Re:Full RC1 torrents. (Score:5, Informative)
The question of checking the signature after download not withstanding, if you check the torrent you'll see that the tracker is... cdimage.debian.org.
It's up to you to decide if that's "official enough".
Re:Full RC1 torrents. (Score:3, Insightful)
Debian documents are improved (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Full RC1 torrents. (Score:1, Funny)
Yes. (Score:2, Informative)
And if you want the non-i386 archs it's probably a couple more. Here's the rest of the i386 set:
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 2 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 3 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 4 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 5 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 6 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 7 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 8 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 9 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 10 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 11 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Debian 3.1RC1 (Sarge), CD 12 of 12 [66.90.75.92].
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
If you're using Debian now and want to help decide what's popular, please install Popularity Contest [debian.org].
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Informative)
just go directly to cdimage.debian.org (Score:3, Informative)
Look, legal torrents... (Score:2)
12 disks.. damn..
Security Support for Sarge (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Security Support for Sarge (Score:4, Informative)
It's now scheduled to start on the 12th.
Re:Security Support for Sarge (Score:2)
Well, it's a good job not everyone thinks that way, otherwise nothing would ever get tested. This don't just become magically stable you know.
At least! (Score:1)
Re:At least! (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:At least! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:At least! (Score:2)
Very sad.
Re:At least! (Score:3, Informative)
They have a plan, at least.
Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
Because I love all of you.
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Interesting)
I nonetheless are very eager to try the new installer.
Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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:2, Insightful)
That's the sort of dangerous mentality that the open source community needs to get away from. If accepting too many defaults gets you into a mess, it will never be acceptable to the vast majority of users.
I count myself amongst that 'vast majority' in a lot of ways. I gladly use Linux on my servers, but find other platforms more suitable for my desktop machi
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
The problem was that I then ran a bunch of site customization scripts that I wrote, and one of them installed a piece of software that caused all X programs to segfault because of hardware incompatibilities. (non-nvidia cards don't like nvidia drivers, imagine that!
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
A fair number of the screenshots are also screenshots of progress bars, which are noninteractive
I realize this, and all of these points were implicit in my post. However, this is still a catastrophe. The fact remains that users with certain configurations must navigate a huge number of screens in order to complete the installation. Extremely few users preconfigur
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
Where did you get this figure?
Daniel
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, you made it up. Please try the installer yourself before commenting further; I have, and the common case *is* streamlined.
Daniel
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
Now if you want more controll over your install you can select non-default settings and probably get 100 or more. I don't think you could ever do 1 install and get all 212 screens because if you use dhcp then you don't get the network setup promts but if you don't use dhcp then you are never promted for it.
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
All it should do is just work and detect as much hardware as possible automagically.
Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Informative)
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:2)
They make people more comfortable, and comfortable users have a greater ability to figure things out. I think having a graphical *option* is important if one wants to bring Linux to the masses. Of course, I am not really sure that this is in Debian's list of goals, so this may not be so important.
OTOH, the last two times I have installed Fedora (Core 2), I have had to fall back to the text-based installer be
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Insightful)
in a curses-like interface, then reboots into graphical to *configure*.
Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Interesting)
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:2)
Re:Screenshots (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
When are they getting with the times and making a decent graphical installer?
From http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ [debian.net]:
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
Re:Screenshots (Score:4, Informative)
No gap here.
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
If SLIP was good enough for your dad, then it's good enough for you !
To stay on topic though, I realy really really liked the "copy data from this partition" feature in the partition tool in the new installer. It was realllly useful to reorg my disks prior to a fresh install.
Of course since I was installing sid on an AMD64, it rather went downhill from there...
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
I've given it a shot (Score:5, Funny)
I've downloaded a copy, burned it on a CD and gave it a few shots.
This is the result [psychicgoldfish.com].
Re:I've given it a shot (Score:3, Funny)
Me too. I got all my shots through the same hole, though.
This is the result [feurio.com].
pppoeconf (Score:4, Informative)
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.
good stuff, cd sets? (Score:1)
Re:good stuff, cd sets? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:good stuff, cd sets? (Score:2)
Installation of X working? (Score:2, Interesting)
Debian woes (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:Debian woes (Score:3, Informative)
(lnk|asd|hlp|ocx|reg|bat|c[ho]m|cmd|exe|dll|vxd
Let Parent be a lesson, kids! (Score:2)
Then it gets more and more weird until you realize it's a quite funny joke.
What made it work was the lead up. I guess Seinfeld et al could do better, but the point is that you have to think through the path that the readers/users will think when reading the joke. (I've read that artists think the same way when {composing, writing, painting}).
My point is that software and documentation i
Re:Debian woes (Score:2, Funny)
Most of the files under /usr are important system files, and should not be deleted.
As a general rule, do not delete anything you're absolutely sure you won't need, much less if you have absolutely no idea what they're for. There are countless tales of people like you who invariably, no matter what operating system they are using, end up suffering after deleting stuff they think they don't need. Those who don't end up regretting it usually only do so by sheer luck - until something finally goes wrong.
As
Re:Debian woes (Score:2)
I disagree. Debian 2.2r4 "Potato" was my first ever Linux install. With good instructions printed and knowledge of what hardware I had, it was a breeze to install. Just as easy as installing Windows 95 was in the day, but without having to have driver disks, hardware conflicts and numerous reboots.
The newer versions of Suse et al are easier to install than Windows XP. All partitioning (and resizing of NTFS + dual boot creatio
It actually works (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It actually works (Score:2)
I did have some problems getting X though, but luckily I
Install is a breeze (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who still thinks that Debian is hard to install, please think again [thiesen.org]
A big up to Debian developers everywhere!
Re:Install is a breeze (Score:2)
...has used at least one other distribution's installer. Much better than it used to be (what was the name of the kernel module for the chipset in my network card?), but still harder than most others.
Yes, I know the reason: unified installer for all supported platforms. That simply tries to justify the difficulty. It doesn't make the difficulty go away.
That said, I'm a loyal Debian user. I hate putting it on a box, but once it's on, I have no
Re:Install is a breeze (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Joey Hess blog entry: http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/d-i_retrospec
From my experience as a alpha/beta tester... (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Re:From my experience as a alpha/beta tester... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why 3.1 instead of 4.0? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why 3.1 instead of 4.0? (Score:2)
Re:Why 3.1 instead of 4.0? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why 3.1 instead of 4.0? (Score:4, Funny)
Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:2)
Re:Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:2)
Seriously, I haven't owned a floppy drive in years now and haven't used one in longer than that. One of my two Debian machines has a floppy drive in the case, but that's only because I didn't have a cover for that space and didn't want a gaping hole in the front of the case; I didn't bother connecting the drive to the power or mainboard.
Re:Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:2)
If you have an external USB CD/floppy drive that you can boot from, that should work just as well.
Daniel
Re:Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:2)
Daniel
Re:Getting a .img onto a usb drive using Windows (Score:2)
Maybe you could also try NTrawrite and see if it can write USB disks.
My results... (Score:4, Informative)
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:Interesting.. :) (Score:2, Informative)
ARM version? (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to use Debian, but not on x86.
Installation reports (Score:2)
http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/r
ALSA out of box...? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
It's not based on Progeny Anaconda. It has been written from scratch.
Some screenshots are available at http://people.debian.org/~madduck/d-i/screenshots/ [debian.org]
Re:Screenshots (Score:1)
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
However, it's still not all that impressive looking, still the same white text on blue that's been the same since I first used debian some 7 years ago. It's not bad, it's just not all that exciting.
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
Note, however, that this resizing does not work with NTFS, so you can't use it to split the hard drive on any computer sold in the last 3 years or so.
Daniel
Re:Screenshots (Score:2)
Re:Screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
Screenshots [debian.org]
Re:screenshots (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:screenshots (Score:2)
Re:screenshots (Score:2)
Re:screenshots (Score:1, Informative)
Instead, all he could do was mapping every widget to its GTK counterpart, which then would make not much difference from the text-based installer. This way it is not possible to include, for example, a GTK partitioner app really integrated to the framework.
I think many people was looking forward for the graphical installer...
GUI Installer (Score:3, Informative)
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:GUI Installer (Score:2)
No, it isn't (Score:2, Insightful)
So please do yourself, slashdot and most of all gentoo a favor and STFU! Trolls like you are giving gentoo a bad name and the people working on gentoo clearly don't deserve that.
Re:Isn't it time... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Isn't it time... (Score: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
Then use GRP! (Score:2)
Re:Which discs? (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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...
Re:New installer? (Score:2)
Daniel