Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob “average” User. Read more .
I would like to add for those reading this that the installer is moduler. It will be possible to have a graphical (read GTK or QT etc) with this same installer, it would appear that this will simply not be the default.
Anyway, I am glad the installer has implemented its own partition tool rather then using cfdisk only. I also thought that there would be a choice between LILO and GRUB, not just a change in favor of GRUB, not that I am complaining, I use GRUB anyway.
I still need to try the installer now that its in a functional state, I will get around to it eventually. Some Debian users say this installer is revolutionary, I am not so sure about that, but it certainly appears to be an improvement, good job Joey.
you type expert on the install, not enter, then you can pick lilo and do some other stuff. As I see it the first part of the install works, but 2 stage- well for Joe he would be lost. So Joe better go for anaconda port or somthing. And I had hoped for 2.6 kernel as an option on the install. And I hope for god sake they get xfree 4.3 working and Gnome 2.6 before release. Or as a Second release or somthing, cause Debian needs badly a new stable now. try woddy on a 200 ide disk, need a newver kernel which is not supported. And kernel 2.6 is soooo much better if you know what to do/install/config.
No offense its great that someone has taken the time to contribute something to the community but what was wrong with a normal review this was just overdetailed and to be honest filled with a whole lot of crap.
The assumptions you make about what an “advanced” windows user is astound me as the window user ur talking about would obviously be hard pressed to call himself even an intermediate windows user let allone say he trully understands how things work.
> The assumptions you make about what an “advanced” windows
> user is astound me as the window user ur talking about would
> obviously be hard pressed to call himself even an
> intermediate windows user let allone say he trully
> understands how things work.
I don’t agree. I used to help out a lot of people to earn some money. I knew by observing others that I was pretty “advanced” (not an expert, but noone around me did it better, even in the computershops), but when I first started with Linux I had to do a whole lot of research (I never forgot this sentence: “You must read, read, read until your eyes bleed”
.
I think the problem is that this “Bob” wants to hold on to his former “knowledge” and therefore gets confused. I don’t believe though that the Linux-installer should be aimed at Windows-Bobs because it is a different system and should be treated as such. The power we receive exists only because we must know a lot more about the different levels of the operating system.
watch here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/debian-devel-ann…
I started to test the daily snaphots of Sarge installer about a month ago, and after about a week I found a snapshot that worked perfectly with my hardware. Using the installer many times I noticed that it looks more complicated than it really is. Most people don’t have the need to go through all the options that are available in the installer. I had already partitioned my hd and I wanted a minimal installation so that I could use apt-get to install all the applications that I wanted. After a couple of days of practising it became a snap to make a minimal Debian installation. The hardware detection also worked OK. But for the first-timer (especially coming straight from MS Windows with no previous Linux experience) the Sarge installer may look a bit scary. 😉
If Bob User really knows nothing and refuses to use docs like this review suggests, then Bob User won’t find Debian a satisfactory OS anyway.
New instaler doesn’t work on my sparc (SPARCengine Ultra AXi) properly yet.
I have been using FreeBSD 5.2 for a while now. And from time to time a thought to switch to linux creeps in my mind. Not that FreeBSD is unusable, no! I really love it! But sometimes I just can’t stand some little things that just don’t work as expected and reason is that most software which is used on desktop is written with linux in mind.
I relly love FreeBSD ports system with it’s flexibility and me beeing ab;e to controll. So far, I have learned that debian IMHO has one of the best binary package management systems. But I think I will miss ports. At least I’d like to have choce between i386 and i686 packages. As I understand there is only for i386 which I think is obsolete. Am I wrong? Also, what other distros would you suggest?
It is another thing to use an OS than to install it. A person who even tries to install an OS, is usually not a complete newbie in PC usage anymore.
I don’t think that a typical PC user who has never installed MS Windows before, and who would probably feel quite frightened and confused to try that (= majority of PC users), would even try to install Debian, or any other OS, how ever easy the installer would be.
People with reasonable experience installing MS Windows or some other OS should have no severe difficulties with the new Debian installer. So that should be a realistic goal. Anyway, installing an OS means that one should know some basics about the OS and hardware already: partitioning, software choices, drivers, how to solve potential problems etc. And at least a newbie should, of course, first read the installation docs; also MS Windows has them, and for a good reason.
Isn’t this what the installer is working towards — To eventually be able to be simple enough for ‘Bob’ to install Debian?
IMO, a few more lines of text with brief explanations of the available choices (like the Fedora install) would help a great deal. To stuff like host name and such, some text with suggestions. A number of distros do this already.
Wait a sec, did I say ‘choices’? Yeah, multiple choice helps a great deal as well with the word ‘recommended’ in parenthesis after what would most likely be the first choice.
Deviation here… there seem to be too many breaks on that article. A horizontal rule (or line) may have sufficed in some of those instances, I think.
I really am someone who is a beginner user, even though over the last couple of years I’ve had various attempts to install distributions of linux.
I recently tried debian and got through the install process okay, with some research and guess work. The real problem came once it was installed. I cannot remember all the problems but a simp, example was that I couldn’t turn off my computer. There was no option on grub or lilo to shutdown. The button simple was not there. I tried another option (maybe within a console?) and was told that only the root could close down from there, so I tried relogging in but it wouldn’t let me. To me this is the real problem – battling though intallation and having no idea how to do the most basic things. Other distrributions have actually been easier.
Agreed! I used debian as my first linux back when poato (2.2 ) first came out, and dselect instead of aptitude. By then i had installed windows 2000 and 98 several times. I also researched linux heavily before I tried installing it so I knew I had to write down all my hardware specs and made sure they were linux compatible. I was able to get through it just fine. I agree that I am not a typical user, but a typical user shouldn’t be installing an OS, let alone an OS designed to operate on more than one platform (or 11). I guess I’m just complaining because people don’t complain about the ease of other distros like Slack or Gentoo (seriously, most of that crap can be automated) or *BSD (not a distro, but you get the point). Let them do what they want.
I would love to see Slack and Debian implement good hardware detection in their installers, but I don’t care if the installer is graphical or text-based. I think that configuring hardware after the install is where a lot of people who are new to those distros get highly confused.
Before anyone flames me for saying that, I use Slackware on my “spare” machine and Debian on my primary system (although I do test install just about every distro I can get my hands on). I don’t mind tinkering, but it would be nice to be able to get new users into a Debian or Slackware system more easily; they’re both very powerful, but you don’t get a chance to see it until they’ve been installed and configured (obviously).
“I would love to see Slack and Debian implement good hardware detection in their installer”
Agreed… Relatively poor hardware (auto)detection is the biggest cause of problems with those installers from an unexperienced user’s point of view, and one of the main reasons why newbies cannot even consider something like Debian.
In my opinion, and besides of a better installer, Debian (or Slackware) could also try to implement some kind of a general configuration centre/tool, so something like YAST of SUSE or Libranet Adminmenu – if Debian really wants to become a “universal operating system”. Finding documentation about all those various zillions of configurations options, files and tools is simply a pain in the ass for anyone not expert aready.
And, by the way, Debian, being so huge and popular a project, should try to improve its online documentation a lot too, I think. At least I feel that other major distros are often ahead of Debian in that respect. The current Debian documentation like guides and howtos is not enough, especially for newbies, as it is often written a bit from a hacker point of view too. And often you have to Google for extra information anyway.
Better installer, hardware detection and documentation, and easier configuration tools, those are the things people often seem to hope from Debian. (And more i686 optimized binaries, and an AMD64 port too, if possible…;-)
I tried what I believe was Beta2, and it was plainly unusable. I’m not talking about it being ugly, but usability was terrible. For example, what’s up with the hard drive partitioning? What ever happened to a simple fdisk type screen where you can partition everything in one screen? Instead, each partition I created, it seemed like I had to next my way through 10 other screens, selecting certain options. WHY? Well problems like this were inherent in the whole design. Arrggggg. I went back to FreeBSD and Fedora after being so disappointed.
Why do you switch distributions because the partition editor in the installer is too complicated? What has the installer to do with daily usage?
At this moment, I use Debian Unstable but installed it with the old installer. Now I think, that Debian and especially the latest version of Aptitude are really great. The only thing *I* really miss is USB hotplugging (so that the USB zip drive and flashcard-reader get a desktop icon automatically). The installation only needs to be done once, isn’t it?
Btw.: the only time I used cfdisk (what the old installer used), it really screwed everything up: partitions not starting/ending on cylinder boundaries, partitions getting other device names without reason… so the last time I installed Debian (after getting fed up with FreeBSD’s bugs) I went to the console and used the plain fdisk.
So, what do I think Debian needs for Joe User:
– USB hotplugging, so that you don’t need to edit fstab when you plug in a USB memory stick.
– Graphical Aptitude frontend (only listing apps, thus not lib* and so on) so that Joe can also install and remove applications and can keep his system up to date
– More hardware detection (video, mouse, sound, …) would be nice but is not really necessary as this only needs to be done after the initial installation. Printer&scanner installation can already be done from the KDE Control Center.
There has been significant improvement between beta2 and beta3. I recently used a daily build from 20040310 and found it much better than the beta2. I agree that it still needs work to compare to installers from other distributions, but it is getting closer.
I treid it out, and am an first time user, well its not as well as i hoped it to be. The installer goes trough everthing, but its still an depending on an deep knowledge of linux. And worse, after the so called install, i get an error about x not starting. (even after config). I think its strange, Klaus Knopper (just one man) can make an distro based on debian, with an no nonsense installer and hardware detection that works great, while an whole team of debian “developers” cannot come up with anything more advanced then this. And there are more debian based distro’s that install just fine ( lindows-xandros, etc. )
I understand that debian runs on 11 platforms, but the least they could do is make an perfect installer for i386.
Untill that time i will use the knoppix version.
Great article. Does a good job of describing how Bob the Windows user would think.
Unfortunately, it seems that the developers of the “new” Debian installer still don’t get it. It looks like the old one except that it has hardware detection now — which, for all I know, is probably very well implemented. But hardware detection does not a good installer make.
For one thing, *good* directions should be built into the installer via help keys (like F1) being available at *every* step of the install. It’s all about the documentation. Keep it accessible and correct.
Sarge will be released with this new installer?
Debian does have a software installer, its called Synaptic, Google to find how to use it, or apt-get install synaptic
SU, enter password, type synaptic. Or if Kde worked, check in your Kicker menu.
I almost stopped reading when I read about Windows users needing the “reboot solution”. He obviously haven’t had experience with Windows the last 4-5 years, so I wonder if he knows who “Bob” really is
I almost stopped reading when I read about Windows users needing the “reboot solution”. He obviously haven’t had experience with Windows the last 4-5 years, so I wonder if he knows who “Bob” really is
damn it! I tend to use Chinese and before 1st reboot, Chinese displays quite well–but when doing 2nd stage job after reboot, the program, base-config, gives out a mess of un-readable ….I don’t know how to express them as they made me crasy.
And, Taiwan is just an province of China, like Hongkong and Macao! Would the honoured developpers replace “contry” with some other words? Or just remove zh_* from the language list.
-Partitioner is very good, but need to be more smart.
-Any where to choose encoding besides language?
“I relly love FreeBSD ports system with it’s flexibility and me beeing ab;e to controll. So far, I have learned that debian IMHO has one of the best binary package management systems. But I think I will miss ports. At least I’d like to have choce between i386 and i686 packages. As I understand there is only for i386 which I think is obsolete. Am I wrong? Also, what other distros would you suggest?”
Why don’t you try Gentoo? Its package system (portage) is based on FreeBSD ports and it sounds like just the transition you’re looking for.
Disclaimer: I know there are people who are sick of hearing Gentoo recommended in every forum whether or not it’s relevant, but I’m not normally one of the people doing that recommending. I’ve never tried Gentoo, I just happen to think it seems like the best fit to klanis’ request.
N.N. wrote:
I almost stopped reading when I read about Windows users needing the “reboot solution”. He obviously haven’t had experience with Windows the last 4-5 years, so I wonder if he knows who “Bob” really is
*Tons* of people still use MS Windows98.
hi im new to debian, i just wanted to try it out, see what the differences are from gentoo apart from source/binary.
but i was wonderig can i have bleeding edge debian, with gnome 2.6 etc… ?? and xfree 4.4 RC1/RC2 (before license change?)
just in gentoo i could have these latest and greatest is this possible in debian, as i always thought debian was about stability, so maybe they dont let u try out the latest and greatest?
Snake
Search for Debian packages here:
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
Sometimes you can find the latest versions from unofficial APT repositories before they arrive to Unstable/Sid:
http://www.apt-get.org/search.php