Progeny Announces Graphical Installer for Debian Woody

jdaily writes "In light of recent negative reviews of Debian in which the installer was roundly criticized, this announcement may have particular timeliness and relevance: Progeny has made available an i386 Debian 3.0 (woody) installer image based on PGI, the Progeny Graphical Installer. This is available at Progeny's free software archive." I've installed Debian so many times that I've just learned to cope with the installer, but this is a much needed boost.

Re:screenshots?

[humboldt]

Try these [progeny.com].

ScreenShots

[Rubbersoul]

For those that are interested here are screenshots of PGI v0.9.6

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

Re:The default debian installer is intimidating

[AntiFreeze]

Yeah, Debian can be like that. You either know exactly which packages you want, or you grab at random, or use something like tasksel to start you off. Tasksel is actually very useful, although sometimes it will install more than you want. Of course, that's better than not installing enough.

In addition, the guys in #debian on irc.debian.org (once the openprojects.net server, who knows what the deal is now with the fundraising fiasco) are extremely helpful if you're trying to figure things out, lost, or just tinkering around.

Clickable link

[Anonymous Coward]

A clickable version of the above link [progeny.com]. (Posting as a coward since I am no karma whore.)

Re:woody?

[Ravenn]

Heh. Dork.

If you look at the history of Debian releases, you may just see the sequence:

1.1 - Buzz
1.2 - Rex
1.3 - Bo
2.0 - Hamm
2.1 - Slink
2.2 - Potato
3.0+ - Woody
Testing - Sarge
Unstable - Sid

But I bet that someone will still have to explain it more to some...

Ravenn

Re:Why now?

[reynaert]

The Progeny installer has three major problems:

• It doesn't work on most of the architectures supported by Debian (does it even work on anything but i386?)
• It is geared toward CD installs, its support for network installs is just not good enough.
• It's too much work to make a installer. The Debian people hope to have a installable version of testing available at all times, but that's just too much work with PGI.

Re:Why now?

[Turmio]

Perhaps because PGI only works with i386 (afaik?) But Debian/unstable is being developed for 13 different Linux-based architectures plus 4 non-linux (hurd, *bsd) [debian.org]. shiny-multimedia-super-douper-developed-for-pc-use rs junk just doesn't work there. That's why you have to build a modular installer engine from scratch so you can choose graphical back-end if your platform supports it or you want in in the first place. I don't want a graphical installation even for my monster AthlonXP box.

And you always have the right to stop bitching and use something else if you don't like the way Debian is doing things. Try it sometime. Thank you very much.

Re:Plese don't ever make this the default

[Fluffy the Cat]

Does the graphical frontend actually offer any significant additions over the text one?

Hardware autodetection. Fewer questions asked. It's not just a graphical version of the standard Debian install, it's something a great deal closer to the Red Hat or Mandrake installers.

Debian will always have a text installer available, because it supports platforms which may not have graphical capabilities. Doing a graphical install over a serial console is, uhm, tricky.

Re:Here we go ...

[dex@ruunat]

And how many companies do you know that are running Debian as their Linux distribution of choice?

You might want to check out http://www.debian.org/users/.

Re:cross-platform?

[GrnyS]

Eh? Refusing?

Last I checked, PGI was in stable, testing and unstable. (But then, last I checked PGI wasn't finished yet, either.)

Re:Debian ain't for n00bz. Get over it.

[JohnFluxx]

Trouble with suse is its proprietry software - some of us switched to linux to get away from all of that.

More information...

[jdaily]

PGI does support ia64 as well as i386, and developers outside of Progeny are working on powerpc. The design is modular, to minimize the work required to make it functional on other architectures (although "minimize" should not imply that it's easy).

We hope to have ia64 CDs available shortly, but given the relative market shares of the two platforms, we wanted to make the i386 images available without waiting for ia64.

Other recent developments at Progeny include the release of Discover 2.0 [progeny.com], a cross-platform extensible hardware identification library and tool; Progeny Graphical Installer (PGI) 1.0 [progeny.com], which contrary to its name is properly an installer creation system; and the announcement of Platform Services [progeny.com], a subscription service that makes it easier for companies to develop and maintain Linux-powered products and services.

Re:Here we go ...

[Ost99]

Well from this [slashdot.org] old slashdot article, it seems like some big companies use it.

And yes, I do work and we use debian on some of our production servers and all of our development servers.

Others seem to like it as well:

"I use a distribution called Debian"

"what really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database"
-- Neal Stephenson

You could also check out www.debian.org/users [debian.org]

And by the way, NASA [nasa.gov] uses Debian for their Aeroshark [nasa.gov] and Ziti [nasa.gov] clusters. They have put Debian in space as well, but the link seems to be rotten...

- Ost

Re:Debian ain't for n00bz. Get over it.

[Phil Hands]

If you switch from 'doze to SuSE, then you're jumping out of the frying pan, into a slightly overheated bath, with someone else controling the temperature.

YaST, and hence SuSE as a whole, is non-free software. Of course Red Hat is drifting that way with their silly trademark games, so I wouldn't recomend them either.

You may say that YaST is almost free, but licenses are more important than many people think. After all, we're not all talking about *BSD taking over from 'doze are we.

Why opt for SuSE's "license-light", when you could give up the non-free license habit entirely?

Re:I love debians installer

[CableModemSniper]

Have you tried apt yet? Seems like thats exactly in the middle. Just get a base system up and running and then apt-get anything else you need.

Re:I love debians installer

[Xibby]

dd? Hmm...sure...that would work...

But I perfer installing one system, getting all the packages I want selected and installed, then on the second system, get base installed. (Getting a Debian system with just the Debian base [base being Linux system up and running and ready for you to use apt-get/dselect/etc.] then, on the system that's in the finished state:

dpkg --get-selections >> zibbys.selections

Transfer zibbys.selections to base system, then run:
dpkg --set-selections zibbys.selections
apt-get dsist-upgrade

And off goes the wonderful tool called apt, downloading all my selections.

Dumping your selections is a great way to do backups on a budget too. Just back up configs, /home, /usr/local, and other custom areas, and a selections file. If you need to recover, install base, add selections, install, restore /etc/, /home/, /usr/local...