New Debian Installer

[Brian Kelsay]

Well, I tried it on my machine and got an error with "libacl1".  I'll try it again and see if the 
file in the archive wasn't just messed up.  I tried another Debian installer from last year (it was 
one of the few that was back up).  It was meant to be a miniCD net installer and it works pretty 
good.  It can install a basic cli Debian from CD and you can apt-get, dselect and tasksel later, in 
fact it does that on reboot.  It  does seem to ask more questions than the previous mini net 
install I tried.  It is a "Woody" or stable install, but that is easily changed.  I tried the iso 
image that defaults to a 2.4 kernel.  I'd post a link, but I grabbed it on another PC with a 
burner.  One thing that struck me was the step where you choose modules for the kernel.  It's 
almost as if you are going through a make menuconfig.  I left my PC at 2am installing new packages 
and updating the small number that were already installed.  I'll see how it looks when I get home.

By the way, dselect is one ugly beast.   They need to group packages better and allow the user to 
collapse whole trees of stuff.  Nothing like looking at 12000 apps in an alphabetical list.  
Taskselect is not bad, but not neat fine grain enough.  And they need to have a section where you 
pick the window managers/ Desktop Environment that you load.  I didn't get a chance to turn off KDE 
or Gnome, I got both and the lightweight WMs were twm and mwm and I couldn't remove those either.  
I'll stick w/ Xfce4 thank you.  And Morphix is a way easier install.

Brian Kelsay

>>> <kurt at verruckt.org> 01/08/04 11:24PM >>>
That is just awesome!. Its like as easy as Red Hat without the garbage
thrown in. Thanks so much for the link.

Kurt

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Kelsay" 

Subject: New Debian Installer

> http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=1026#comment 
> http://freedesktop.org/~daniel/d-i/ 
>
> Since we were talking about the new Debian Installer I thought I would
track it down.  The Freedesktop link above has the beta1 release and it
seems to work.  I didn't actually go through with an install, but booted to
it and went thru the first couple of menus on both disks.  The business card
iso is for both rescue and install, but I would get the netinstall iso as it
contains all known network driver modules.  I'll try to do an install at
home tonight on a victim machine.
>
> http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/images/ 
> Has daily snapshots, but not iso images.
>
>
> Brian Kelsay