Next-Generation Debian Installer

**BurntAsh** · 11-14-2003, 09:30 PM

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.

http://articles.linmagau.org/modules...455&page=1

**cloverm** · 11-14-2003, 10:36 PM

Wow. A community-supported distro with an easy--to-use installer. Sounds like a winner to me ...

**Kernel_Killer** · 11-14-2003, 11:49 PM

The new installer is pretty nice. You can find it in any of the Debian Sarge RCs. It was definatly a shocker at first.

11-15-2003, 04:08 AM

[quote author=cloverm link=board=7;threadid=8127;start=0#msg73890 date=1068852982]
Wow. A community-supported distro with an easy--to-use installer. Sounds like a winner to me ...
[/quote]

sounds like Fedora to me

**Ashcrow** · 11-17-2003, 11:20 PM

That looks exactly the same as the installer on Woody to me when just looking at the screenshots. I was really hoping to see a graphical installer ...

**demian** · 11-17-2003, 11:41 PM

[quote author=Ashcrow link=board=7;threadid=8127;start=0#msg74036 date=1069114841]
That looks exactly the same as the installer on Woody to me when just looking at the screenshots. I was really hoping to see a graphical installer ...
[/quote]

From the article:

In this beta build the installer runs in text mode because it's the most widely supported, 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. No doubt once the core functionality of the installer is sorted we'll start seeing some alternative front-ends become available, but for now it's text.

11-18-2003, 11:06 AM

Debian has an impressive pool of software sadly their release cycles are feature based not timebased which can cause some problems.

However I'm looking forward to a stable release if a new installer and hopefully Debian GNU/HURD to play with

Anyone try the gtk test builds of this yet btw. I saw screenshots of it on OSNews the other days looked fairly bland but it's a nice development to see that Debians installer no longer makes you want to kill someone.