
Progeny Announces Graphical Installer for Debian Woody 231
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.
They should have done this a long time ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Installing Debian (or Gentoo) is just too damn confusing. I admire what Debian and Gentoo are aiming for, but they need to come up with a no-hassle installer.
Re:I love debians installer (Score:5, Interesting)
I, for one, will stick with the ncurses generic Debian install, for it is what I use and like, but I will also welcome the graphical installer, for it will be quite helpful to other people and bring more people over to use Debian who were initially scared away by the hardcore install.
In other words, I don't see this as a matter of improving the install, but simply making it more readily available to those for whom the install was previously too complicated for. This is a good thing.
[I apologize for any incoherence in the previous statements, I'm running on no sleep... again.]
Plese don't ever make this the default (Score:5, Interesting)
Does the graphical frontend actually offer any significant additions over the text one?
Re:Why now? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why it couldn't be used for the platform 90%+ of Debian users use (i386) I don't know.
Mix and match? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to see a better text-based installer (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't had any problems with the Debian installer , but I can understand it can be daunting to a newbie. Allthough I've seen Debian installations done by people not too acquainted with Linux (but they did have experience with other OSes (sp?)).
Anyway, I'm confident the Debian developers will come up with a decent installer by the time Sarge is promoted to stable.
Re:I love debians installer (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure it hasn't changed, and I HOPE it hasn't changed, because OF that installer, I can get a debian box set up and going in less than 20 minutes.
I believe one of debians strengths [installer] has been to, perhaps, "weed out", those who are incapable of reading HOWTO's and README's PRIOR to installation.
Show them what you got (Score:2, Interesting)
Just my two cents,
Yuioup
Such a strong base, such a weak Installer (Score:2, Interesting)
Beautiful distros like Knoppix are being released with their foundation being debian. Debian and redhat are the two most morphed distros around, but debians granularity, robustness and general goodness and quality beats up redhat in these departments exactly.
If they would add a graphic installer, I hope the next debian wouldnt jump into an X installer by default. Theres a particular strength in the level of control and flexibility that debian has now and shouldnt be sacrificed no matter how many grandmas are waiting for it. If you dont like debian use knoppix, or morph it yourself into another prettier distro. I am using knoppix now and will always use a distro on top of debian, dselect, no matter how pretty you make it, will be uugggly.
Re:I'd like to see a better text-based installer (Score:2, Interesting)
I had problems with install packages while installing OpenBSD (files were in upper case--I was installing from a DOS partition), but quickly I could escape to the shell, fix path and then I continued the installation. Wow! you could never ever think of that in a GUI based installers in any version of Micro$oft Windows you care to mention.
But, if the GUI installer allows me this kind of flexibility as in OpenBSD's installer, yay! we welcome it!
Re:The default debian installer is intimidating (Score:1, Interesting)
Where Debian does fall down is with their hardware detection. I've been using Debian for several years now after learning with Slackware. The hardware detection process throughout the entire installation is just shitty. It's not just the installation process, but everything after that. Adding hardware or software that uses hardware (sound support, openGL) specifically is a nightmare beyond anything I've ever experience anywhere else. In just about every case I have had to resort to doing all of the hardware configuration by hand. Exceptions to this are CD-burners and my only USB device.
But even those required a lot of back-end work to get the user-rights sorted out. I didn't even know that joe-user was not part of the audio group or that USB devices are mounted as root-only.
I think Debian is awesome and will probably not leave it unless gentoo can get their shit together. But hardware is a nightmare. I think this is true on just about any system though.
Re:I love debians installer (Score:2, Interesting)
That said, yes, debian's installer is pretty good, better than pgi I'd say, but there are always things that could be improved.
Re:Plese don't ever make this the default (Score:3, Interesting)
If they accomplish the same thing so what if the GUI is slow and clumsy. A lot of people is only going to do it once. Why spend anytime learning just how to use the installer? I'd rather spend time learning something I'll do more than once.
"Zero learning curve, abysmal usability / speed" summarizes the behavior of most GUI. If I only have to do it one time the Zero learning curve is going to make up for the usability / speed and then some.
Re:cross-platform? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They should have done this a long time ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Well if you see that, then your vision is clearly better than mine, because I didn't say such thing. All I said that debian installer is not aimed at n00bs. It doesn't mean that it was done so on purpouse.
Frankly, improving installer that is already fully functional and is used for approx 15min out of 3-4 years of uptime, seems a bit ridiculous to me. If you want to do it, then go ahead, this is a free world, but demanding people doing this for free, is a bit fat for me.