Progeny Ports Red Hat's Anaconda To Debian

JoeBuck writes "According to this message from Ian Murdock on the Debian developer's mailing list, the Progeny folks have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian. They have also written a tool that "facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets". They are also engaged in other interesting unification work, and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side." uberkludge points out an article with more details at Ars Technica.

Historical note

Ian Murdock is the "ian" in Debian. Deb is Debra, his wife.

Re:Great News! But...

Of course there are other issues...

Python as a required part of the base install... Some will dance, others will puke.

Also, tiny root partitions w/ everything other than /bin /lib /etc mounted did not work w/ Ananconda - at least with RH 7x. You needed a couple hundred MBs free in / to install. This required some fancy "behind the scenes" work - from a console between installer stages - for me to get my 6.2 boxes up to 7.0.

Of course, if you throw the works into /dev/hda1 - there's no prob! Unless you are worried about local priv escalation and other *NIX security issues...

installation packages

... and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side ...
I hope that all other distro creators work towards this too, so many packaging formats just confuse new Linux users, and make it even more difficult for Linux to take part in the desktop world.

AWWW YEAH

My anaconda don't want none unles you got buns, hon.

Alien

One very nice utility they might be able to use is Alien [kitenet.net] which allows you to convert from rpm's to debs and many other formats as well

Rus

Anaconda Screenshots

These Anaconda Screenshots [redhat.com] look good and could make Debian a lot easier to approach for Joe Average.

--
I have a truly marvellous reason to post this as an AC, which however the margin is not large enough to contain.

What does this mean in practice?

Progeny had a graphical installer available for their Debian-based distro for years, and instead of taking over this one, Debian started creating its own graphical installer despite of a great lack of human resources for the project.

Now I don't know much about Anaconda or what it really is, and I also don't know much about Debian's reason not to use the Progeny installer, but you'll understand that I'm not really convinced that this would change installing Debian until I've heard confirmations from the Debian side of things.

Skolelinux and the new Debian Installer

Debian do have a new installer. Petter Reinholtsen, Michael Cardenas, Tollef Fog Heen and the the others of the Debian-Installer team has made a new installer for Debian Sarge.

Skolelinux uses this new installer today!:
http://developer.skolelinux.no/index.html .en

URL to the new Debian Installer:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-ins taller/

Todo list for the new Debian Installer:
http://cvs.debian.org/debian-installer /doc/TODO?re v=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

Good for corporations adpoting Debian

This is certainly a good thing for corporations adopting Debian... especially since Redhat now has it's 1 year End Of Life policy for it's desktop products. I've always found Debian's release policy FAR more stable than almost any other distro out there, and stability is probably the main focus of most companies (far more than the latest wizz-bang features).

Hopefully this will see more corporations adopting Debian, Linux, and will result in a more unified installation process.

that's not leet!

Everyone knows having a shitty installer is what makes an OS leet!

Then when only super experts can install it just saying you use it shows instant leetness!

Sure, you don't know why OpenBSD is more secure or how to use ipfilter but by george you got it installed on your laptop! Well now, aren't you mr. leet. When average joes and janes can just slap a debian cd in their drive and be up and running with no troubles how will you get respect as a leet dood? You'll have to switch to gentoo!

Shit, gentoo is so leet it doesn't even have an installer!

If debian gets an installer that anyone can use to get up and running in less than half an hour that will definatly be a problem for debians leet factor.

Changes

Now I'm not usually one to protect users from computers and in particular linux, but when it comes to the computer illiterate (is that spelled right :P ). I usually try and steer them towards one of the safer distros like RedHat or Mandrake, its not because I prefer either of those two for working on, its simply that debian besides being difficult to successfully install (though not as confusing as OpenBSD), features enough different packages to make anyone a little lost.

It has quite frankly always been the "power users" Linux. And some of those whould be repulsed at the thought of changing that. Some of my friends suggested that the reason debian was so good was that it only attracted the real geeks, i.e. those that could contribute and make it stronger.

In the end though what are computer for if not to make the live of both computer literate and illiterate easier. While it may anger some, the masses finally having access to Debian's enormous repository of packages, amoung other benefits, will be a good step forward. And a change that move Linux closer to eroding the market strangle hold that Microsoft Possesses.

Relation to debian-installer

Could anyone clarify how this Anaconda installer port relates to debian-installer [debian.org]? In particular, is it also intended to work on PowerPC [soziologie.ch]?

Knoppix?

What happened to using the Knoppix [knoppix.org] stuff in the Debian installer? I think the hardware detection of Knoppix really kicks ass.

The thing I think troubles new users most isn't the choise between package types - it's partitioning the harddisk and knowing what their hardware actually is. That last one can be helped by good hardware detection, but partitioning a disk is something else. What do you think would be best to make partitioning as easy as possible?

A little rearranging, sprinkle in a few words...

... and you have a /. troll!

"I'd like to put my anaconda in Portman and create progeny."

-- Dr. Eldarion --

I wonder if they fixed the bugs in Anaconda

I wonder if they fixed the bugs in Anaconda that prevent it from understanding an fstab which contains either:

a LABEL= line instead of a device name
a file system type of "auto"

(and yes, I have reported both to RH.)

Perhaps they even fixed it so that when there is a failure, you have the option of going to another VC, fixing the problem, and trying again, rather than Anaconda's current behavior of "Nope. Had an error. Gonna reboot now. Definitely gonna reboot. [OK]"

APT and RPM...

Can be used on the same systems without using Alien anyways. They dont really coexist on the server, but my box handles them both flawlessly. SuSE supports APT and RPM's well. I have never had a problem with using either packaging format. Do other "commercial" distro's not do this? I know there is a big (and almost religous) argument on which is the better format, but to me, (just a user, not a developer) I dont see any difference. OTOH, I dont think having things get to standardized is a good idea. I like how some distros do some things and dont like how others do the exact same thing. It wouldn't stop me if everything was done a way I dont like it, but it would take a lot longer to get my box the way I want it.

Before passing judgement on Debian's installer...

It helps to realize that the debian installer has been developed to work with all of Debian's supported architectures (currently 10 - i386, m68k, sparc, alpha, powerpc, arm, mips, hppa, ia64, and s390). Such an installer has to sacrifice some beauty and convenience for flexibility and power, and those of us who only compare debian's i386 installation to that of RedHat's or Suse's need to realize this. That all said, because of the overwhelming majority of debian users who only use i386 machines, it sure makes sense to me that it would be beneficial to develop a fancy i386-only installer to satisfy the masses. There are plenty of other debian-based distros who have done just that (with varying success). Perhaps this anaconda port is the beginning of just such a project.

Re:Before passing judgement on Debian's installer.

I don't know if you've ever actually worked with anaconda, but (like other open source software) it's possible to hammer it do whatever you need. There is support in anaconda for non i386 archs (s390, sparc, and IIRC, vestigial traces of the alpha installer). Yes, it's going to be a pain to implement code to handle new archs (like the PPC), but there are enough examples of how to do it that it should be possible.

The one thing that makes me downright ecstatic in all this is the prospect of being able to use the "kickstart" feature of anaconda for Debian. RH's kickstart is pretty damn flexible (as opposed to FAI, FreeBSD's unattended install mode, Solaris's jumpstart, and even the Winders solutions that are available). With the kickstart, it's possible to build and install a customized system from modular parts (instead of having to rely on image based installs)... and that makes it easy to slide in updates or quickly implement new install types.

Hardware autodetection is abstracted out via kudzu (yes, it's a pain after the OS is installed, but at install time it's a godsend and makes probing hardware programmatically much easier).

On top of that, you can hack up anaconda to do some other "interesting kickstartish type stuff" (in the words of Matt Wilson).

Kudos for the Progeny boys for making this available. :) It's going to enable some cool stuff to be done with Debian.

Debian variants "commercially [un]successful"?

From the article:
Debian variants have been created over the years; none of them has been commercially successful.

...err... does "Lindows" ring the bell?

What is a distibution (debs + rpms side by side)

One of the roles of a distribution is to provide cohesion between many thousands of seperately managed projects.

Distributions have policies that dictate how they achive this cohesion.

The only way to seamlessly mix debs and rpms (or other pkg format) is if they follow an identical policy.

If people turn to the LSB to provide a common policy then the LSB will effictively become a distribution.

If distributions have identical policies then they loose their individuality, and their reason to exist.

If you sacrifice the purity of a distribution you will always have to pay a price for it.

LSB isnt the answer, distributions need to be a bit different.

Diversity is a strength, but you need to recognise it.

Backwards compatibility

This seems awfully backwards to me. I don't mean to start a ditsro flame war, but as a Debian user I've *never* had to use a Redhat package. Debian's repository is ridiculously huge (actually, too huge, in my opinion) and is well maintained by the packagers and the high Debian standards.

If anything, Redhat should be making it easier to have debs and rpms live side by side on their machines. In fact, Redhat's whole Fedora thing just seems like an attempt to recreate Debian. Why bother?

This is getting a little bit off-topic, but take gnome for example. Gnome properly requires dozens of different libraries to accomplish what it needs - but many times I hear people bitch and moan about gnome's "dependency hell". I am throughly convinced the people who are complaining about that are just the people who's distros don't have (or aren't employing) proper library dependency checking, upgrading, versioning, etc. And what do you know, that's exactly the sort of thing Debian solves beautifully.

Anaconda and APT

The only exclusively PowerPC GNU/Linux distro, Yellow Dog, uses the Anaconda installer in its most recent update (3.3, I think). And it is very nice. For me it bested SuSE's Yast2 as the best installer.

Yellow Dog also uses RPM binaries but includes a version of APT to manage them. They claim that the combination of APT and RPM is not original to them but was converted by a distro in Latin America - I can't remember which.

This is a welcome development

Well folks, I don't know about you, but I think this is a welcome development. I have been using Red Hat for a LONG time now (>5 years), and at one point, I decided to give Debian a try, after hearing how it was supposed to be the REAL "power users" distro. Well, Debian's installer truly is horrible. Not only is it inflexible and difficult to use from the end-users' standpoint, but I understand that MOST OF ALL, it is even difficult for the Debian developers to work with.

Personally, I think an Anaconda-based Debian installer could be a *HUGE* boom, for 3 reasons:

1) It would make Debian easier to install. In my opinion, "ease of use" != "less powerful." Even developers and power users can benefit, in my opinion, by having things be difficult just for the sake of difficulty.

2) Having a distribution-neutral Anaconda would be a huge boom for the Linux community, and potentially for strengthening the LSB.

3) I'm not so sure I like the idea of having .debs and .rpms together on all Linux systems, but I think it would be nice to see some of the best features of each packaging system melded together--maybe calling the result "dpm." (lol) Seriously; RPM has some nice features (like its TOTAL automation), and DPKG also has some nice features (like OR'd dependencies. I like the idea of that much better than RPM's file dependencies).

We all know there are plenty of dependency resolvers like APT and YUM and UP2DATE, etc.; I think these should ultimately be melded together, too. Why do we need 2 different package formats, and 3 different dependency resolvers/updaters?

Installer

am i, like, the only person who liked the old one better than most other dists?

A long wait

I look forward to all of this being integrated into a stable version of Debian. Shall we say, around 2008?

Re:debian is crap

Bill has you working this early on a Saturday morning?

Re:Is it true?

It's true. You couldn't get a first post to save your life.

Re:Redhat ads in installer

They'll almost certainly be taken out, there's no reason for a Debian install to have RedHat pictures.

But I wouldn't say they were really ads, at least not for other companies. Some were interesting facts, and others told about stuff like RHCE's/up2date/etc.

Re:So...

However, I think the main obstacle that prevent Debian from being more widely accepted is the fact that the debian folks are very reluctant to package "wizards" and automatic configuration scripts in the distribution.
Of course, there is debconf, but its invocation is rather tricky for non Debian-savy users.

Re:So...

I've been using a Debain-based distro called MEPIS [mepis.org] for several months now. FWIW, I've contributed to the developer because I really dig this OS.

It features a live CD like Knoppix and lets you install the distro through the live CD w/an installation application. In addition - the hardware detection was damn near flawless - talk about your easy install of Debain!!

Re:So...

Oh yeah... cause you know, I'm reinstalling Debian all the time... wait. That's right, I'm NOT. I last installed Debian on my home desktop about 4 or 5 _years_ ago, and it's never once needed reinstalling. Though debian-installer, once it's done, should improve things significantly, how often do you really see the installer? Seriously, how often?

Re:So...

Debian's had a decent installer for years (through PGI or Knoppix). They're not the official installers (and Anaconda won't be either), but the option has always been there.

Re:FISTING POST

Because he's l33t!!!!!!!!!!1111111111!!!!!!!!11oneoneoneoneone! !!!11!!!!!!111!

Re:Now if we could get Red Hat to use apt instead.

And exactly WHAT businesses do you recommend operating system software to? The business your dad runs?

What do you consider so wrong with RPM? Dependencies? Use apt-rpm, yum, or even redhat's own up2date. Have you even looked at redhat in the last 2 years?

For most businesses, debian is NOT an option. They want a company pushing the product. They want a solution...not just an operating system. They want tech support. They want to know somewhere there is a boardroom with a bunch of guys making decisions. Like it or not, those are the type of things businesses look for.

Re:Now if we could get Red Hat to use apt instead.

Quote from Ian's announcement: "We have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian; essentially, we replaced calls to RPM with calls to APT, and replaced Red Hat-specific configuration hooks with calls into the configlets and debconf. We have also written a tool called PickAx that facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets. We are also working with various parties to add/merge RPM support into the mainline APT, to allow Debian- and RPM-based distributions to be managed using a single APT codebase, and possibly even to allow Debian and RPM packages to coexist side by side. This work also aims to merge our various APT extensions (e.g., support for authenticated APT repos) into the mainline APT." Guess it answers your questions.

Wish granted.

I'll quote from Fedora Core 0.95 Release Notes at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/ :

The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) now supports installing packages from apt and yum repositories as well as local directories. This includes dependency solving and obsoletes handling. Additional repositories can be configured in the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file.

Fedora Core is the new name for the free Red Hat distribution.