“The experience of installing Debian can vary widely depending on your hardware and requirements. There simply isn’t room here to provide a comprehensive installation guide. Instead, you’ll find an outline of the major points of the installation process, and plenty of information about where to go and what to do when things don’t work as expected.” In related news, work is under way to provide a gtk+ front-end to the Debian installer.
Looking at the screenshots of the new GTK+ frontend to the installer, I wonder what’s the point of it. Basically, it recreates the UI of the text-based installer using GTK+ without any significant simplifications or usability enhancements. Just look at the partitioning steps… Why not port the partitioner from Mandriva? Or adapt mdk installer or Anaconda?
Many people are scared of a DOS-like look. So this is not a bad step to start when going to a ‘GUI installer’. I personally do not have any problems with the partitioner of debian (but I do use it quite often when testing something on my ‘f**k-up PC’).
And the partitioner itself still leave plenty of options. Have it done almost automatically, or try it yourself.
I personally do not have any problems with the partitioner of debian (but I do use it quite often when testing something on my ‘f**k-up PC’).
I have zero problems with it, too, but the point is: it’s not people like us, advanced users, that this installer is presumably being created for.
Given a blank hard disk (not windows previously installed) 90% of average population puts a cd in drive and then…..
debian asks for partition the drive, what??
then what is swap partition??
what is mount point, why can’t linux just install???
file system reiserfs, ext2… god knows what it is?
ok cool down….it goes to network detection….most confusing part…what if i dont have ethernet…only dialup…..
then comes grub installation…should it be in / or mbr…..joe screams ..shutup and just install it anywhere…..
ok everything works fine….restart and….
get command prompt……because X11 is not configred….
this is the same wih user friendly distros.also
mepis –get cloop errors,
knoppix…which way debian or knoppix way instalation and what if kde starts in german langauge…..
xandros….many times it doesn’t install…
How to get reasonably good looking fonts after kde installation…..nobody knows…..
other extreme think MS…..given a chance to install on blank HD…..how many of those 90% will complain to install DOS Win3.1 Win95, win 98, win2K, Xp and Vista statistically NONE….
WILL YOU BUY A BRAND NEW CAR AND THEN YOU HAVE TO INSTALL TIRES, TUNE ENGINE, DO OIL CHANGE AND READ 1000 PAGES MANUAL……BEFORE DRIVING….CERTAINLY NOT…..
it will take most popular debian distros another 10 years to match winXP installation and hardware detection capabilities….
you sir, must be a complete numpty if you cannot follow a step-by-step installation process.
and the rest of your post, just an amateurish attempt at an anti-linux troll that has been proved to be well incorrect years ago.
You make very valid points when describing the Debian installer. For instance, it should ask you if and how you are connecting to the internet. The partition interface could be better.
However, your reasoning about the Win installers is completely flawed. The reason people don’t complain about Windows installations is because they never have to do it themselves, and when they do it, they’re using a restore CD provided by the PC vendor that is exclusively tailored to their hardware. Installing Windows from a plain retail Windows CD however, is even more painful than a Debian or Ubuntu install. First of all, its hardware detection is marginal. Sure it’ll run (provided you have the right driver disk for your hard drive_), but when you first reboot, your resolution will be 640×400 with 8 bit color and half your hardware won’t work. Time to dig out all the driver disks for all your hardware and install them one by one. Once you’re done, connect to the internet and start patching. Then download ZoneAlarm, SpyBot and AdAware. Then start installing all your apps. Indeed, installing a Windows box takes all afternoon.
The point is, if Debian or whatever distro came pre-installed, people wouldn’t complain about the installer either.
I’m sure the few people that buy Linspire PC’s from Microcenter or whatever don’t complain about the installer, since there is none for them to deal with.
I agree
My expectation is simple. linux developers should surpass at least one installation area better than MS.
Give old or new box with exact same config of hardware vid card/blank HD/ mouse/ printer/ scanner/ ethernet/ modem/ digital cam (i think this is minimum hardware required for newbie) and then lets compare difficulties linux distro vs windows installation.
Has anyone did this study??
“should surpass at least one installation area better than MS”
??? Whoa, what, where, oh,… doh.
Now come on. You can say anything on MS’s installers but you can’t seriously say they are good for anything useful (right, besides jumping a windows os on perfectly uninteresting hardware). I mean, how many more years will it take a drunken MS developer to finally make possible to use other media for driver loading than A: ? On top of that how many more extra years to be able to handle remote mount points during install, then providing some _real_ partitioning app during install, and I could just go on and on with this, and it would not be my first time on this topic.
As I see it (and I’ve seen quite a number of installers) the windows os installer is probably the one I wouldn’t mind at all if it disappeared.
I’ve personally taught total noobies the mandriva installation sequences (not geeks, not CS students) and they caught it pretty fast. So, your rant is off the point and quite falacious.
And XP Pro has its share of mysteries if you’re JoeSixPack, i’ve also seen it myself.
I’ve used nearly every version of the Mandriva installer, Debian installers old and new, and probably about a half a dozen other linux installers…
Debian’s new installer is really pretty good. Some people may knock it for not having an XWindows front end, but text isn’t that scary. The people that say it’s too hard would be hard pressed to find any installer that is really that much better (I think the easiest installer I ever saw was the Corel 4 step installer).
No matter what OS you install you eventually come to a point where you have to carve up the disk… If a person doesn’t know about partitioning there is no way you can really take the scary out of that… You can take the users ‘ability to meddle’ with partitioning away, but that would really aggravate those of us who like to think we know better than our installers…
Really, if you have even a modest amount of computer know how you should be able to get through a Debian install (Or most other distros, or OSes). If you don’t have that knowledge, or aren’t prepared for a ‘learning experience’, what the heck are you doing installing an operating system in the first place?
personally i love the new debian installer. i wouldnt mind having an optional gui installer, i like the MDK installer. i t hink i would take debian installer over anaconda though….
and yes if you arent willing to learn what are you doing here in the first place?
gui != better
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=395&slide=1
It’s just not a bitmapped one. Give me the present debian installer any day of the week over some “gui” installer.
Last time I tried anaconda on a foresight linux install, python and X kept on crapping out on me.
I find the Sarge installer reasonable easy for beginners except for the first step – the first screen say press F1 for help, or push Enter to boot. And of course every novice press Enter, of those few who press F1 even less will find that they ought to write “linux26” before pressing enter. The first step should be like…
Welcome to Debian gnu/linux 3.1 Sarge setup
Press F1 for help
Setup options:
( X ) To use Linux 2.6 Kernel(for Modern hardware)
( ) To use Linux 2.4 Kernel(more tested/stable)
( ) Expert Mode
I don’t know how many newbies that has posted on Debian forums that has installed Debian with the wrong (for them) kernel. That Debian lacks a Graphical installer I only think is a strength, a Graphical GUI would only make the installer potentional much more unstable with the only benifit of some eyecandy.
Oh sure, the gtk installer as presented in the linked shots looks so much better than the text based one.. haha
Unless they add some functionality, I don’t think there is a purpose to it. It doesn’t exactly look good either.
Text based is perfectly functional. Rejecting a distro because of a text based install is retardedly superficial.
The gtk installer in its current state does not offer anything (except better support for RTL languages) over the curses installer. This is an early attempt so give the guys some time to work out the usability issues and don’t be so quick to dismiss it as useless.
Installation articles? An article about installation?! This is a problem, a very large one
No. It really isn’t any problem. It’s just that installing Debian USED TO be considered difficult because the installer asked many detailed questions about your hardware and most people didn’t know the right answers.
But now installing Debian is pretty easy, even for those users who have only a vague idea about the hardware they have. Different kinds of hardware auto-probing and auto-configuration have been added to Debian Installer in order to make installing Debian easier than it was before.
And Debian Installer is still a project that is under heavy development — the developers are trying to make it even easier for new users. So, in this respect, it’s nice to have articles that review how easy it currently is to install Debian. This may encourage more people to try Debian proper, the GNU/Linux distribution that has more derivatives than any other distro.
The last time I used debian the installer was very very minimal. It would install the system fine but the only driver it installed would be for the networkcard leaving me to setup X and sound from scratch as well as printer and any other misc devices.
Has the installer advanced to the point of setting up X even with vesa drivers (hopefully nvidia). as well as sound drivers for audigy. I seem to remember debian not doing any kind of hardware detection at all
Of course, for the masses (which are probably on their daily Ubuntu dose right now anyway) would be nice if they saw some fancy clickety installer which would load three dozen of modules and guess some default config for everything. But than again, ther’s kanotix or knoppix, you can use it as an installer for debian and you got all the bells and whistles.
Still, there are some of us who a) know their hardware b) know what they are doing and can appreciate a minimalist base system install in about 5 minutes. I personally think it is the greatest way to install debian. From a base install (and having some knowledge, which, please admit it, wouldn’t hurt any user out there) a fully working and configured workstation with all applications install (with literally thousands of applications) takes 1-2 hours. My baby.
Thing is, IMHO Debian is more (or less, depends how you look at it) than a Linux distribution. It’s more some kind of meta-distribution, meaning it doesn’t give you 1 cd worth of data and some repos with apps, but it gives you a very efficient installer (which you don’t like) and around 15k packages. That means that every debian install in essence is a new distro, depending how you tailor it. And you don’t even need a new name for it, or if you can’t live without a named distro, give your installed debian a name yourself :]
All in all, in my world the Debian installer is about a dozen keystrokes and a quickly dumped base system install, and that’s good with me. The rest is party and beer
I don’t think your question is OT at all. As I see it, the main article (and also the news about the development of a GUI frontend) basically tell how installing Debian has become easier than it was before. And the “next generation” of the Debian Installer (targeted for the Etch release) will apparently be even easier for beginners.
The Debian Installer currently uses a tool called “discover” as its primary hardware detection system. Personally I think that discover does a pretty good job, although it may fall behind the other tools, like RedHat’s kudzu or SUSE’s hwinfo, on some areas. Also “hotplug” is enabled by default in the Debian Installer and that definitely widens the range of hardware that the Debian Installer detects. There are also Debian packages available for kudzu and hwinfo in case you want to use these instead of discover. But you’ll have to install these seperately — they don’t come with the default installation.
Debian’s discover should detect most of the network cards (well, it detected my card ;-)). I think the audio card detection is pretty much up to the “alsaconf” tool. There are some Debian-specific tweaks made to the hotplug config files that should ensure that if your audio card is detected by alsaconf, then hotplug doesn’t try to load any OSS modules. But you need to run “alsaconf” (as root) from the command line (followed by “alsamixer” to set up the sound volume levels). The current version of Debian Installer doesn’t (yet) do this automatically for you, like Ubuntu does.
Also setting up the X server is one area where the Debian Installer is perhaps currently not on par with some other desktop oriented distros. I really hope that the next version of Debian Installer (for Etch) will improve the display hardware auto-detection and auto-configuration. It is very likely that this will be the case.
In the meanwhile, if the auto-detection of your display hardware fails during the initial installation, you can install an additional tool called “xdebconfigurator”. After installing this tool, you can run the command “xdebconfigurator -x” (as root). This command will probe for your display hardware and it will output a list of very useful details it has detected. You can use this information in “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86” (or “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”, if you’re running Debian testing or unstable).
Anyway, I’d like more people to recognize that the Debian Installer HAS become considerably easier than it was before. And the next version (for the Etch release) will be even easier.
there should be a partitioner similiar to qtparted.
Unfortunately it seems that all development in qtparted has stalled. Gparted seems to be a more active project at the moment.
In the Debian Installer, you should notice that the installer shows a small picture of a skull and crossbones for each partition that it plans to edit.
Basically you navigate through the partitioner in the Debian Installer by pressing the Enter and up/down arrow keys. You should create at least a root partition (marked by a slash mark “/”) and a swap partition.
If you want to be sure that Debian installs smoothly, you can always use SimplyMEPIS or SystemRescueCD (both come with qtparted) to create the necessary partitions for Debian beforehand. :-p