Major New Features in Debian Etch

Klaidas writes "Linux.com reports that the third beta of Debian Etch installer (released August 11, 2006) has some major new features, which might make this version of Debian the easiest to install. According to the original announcement, we will now be able to install using a graphical user interface on i386 and amd64 platforms. We will also be able to set up encrypted partitions during installation. Debian Etch is scheduled to be released on December 2006"

Install is (1 of) Linux's biggest problem(s)

[andrewman327]

I believe that installation is one of Linux's biggest stumbling blocks to larger adaoption. I spend most of my Linux time running Live CDs where there is no OS installation at all (I love you Ubuntu). The issue for many home users is software installation. While there have been significant inroads made in this area over that past few years, it has generally not yet reached Windows' "double click the .exe to run" simplicity. Linux has a huge following among the geeks, nerds, and geeky nerds. It is also growing into mobile devices where people will have no idea they are running Linux and [nokia.com]schools [slashdot.org] on the desktop. The biggest market that needs to be tapped is the "average" computer user at home. People need to feel that Linux is user friendly and can easily do everything that they want to do. Firefox and OoO (both of which I run on my WinXP laptop) have brought it that much closer to the goal. Now easier software installation is the next step.

Major New Features

[iiioxx]

At the risk of sounding like a troll, is this not a sign of how far behind the rest of the Linux world Debian has let itself fall? An installation GUI touted as a "major new feature"?

For years, Debian was heralded for it's packaging system, and yes apt-get is/was great. But the rest of the distros caught up, and easy, automated installation and updating is now a feature that one expects in a Linux distro as standard equipment. Just like a GUI installer.

This is like a car manufacturer in 2006 saying they've just added airbags to their cars, and it's a "major new feature!"

It's not a major new feature. It's about damn time.

Re:Major New Features

[eipgam]

I'm just glad it's optional. I've never been a big fan of graphical installers, they've traditionally been awful and sluggish. And lets be honest, it's not like the current debian installer is hard to use.

Re:Major New Features

[Pecisk]

AFAIK, nor yast nor RedHat eq. is not as powerful and stable as apt-get, so no, it is not just about features, but it is about features done WELL.

Fedora and SUSE still feels very old - because of rpm usage - against Debian and Ubuntu. And that is my expierence after 7 years of using Linux in work and home.

Re:Major New Features

[Eudial]

At the risk of sounding like a troll, is this not a sign of how far behind the rest of the Linux world Debian has let itself fall? An installation GUI touted as a "major new feature"?

For years, Debian was heralded for it's packaging system, and yes apt-get is/was great. But the rest of the distros caught up, and easy, automated installation and updating is now a feature that one expects in a Linux distro as standard equipment. Just like a GUI installer.

This is like a car manufacturer in 2006 saying they've just added airbags to their cars, and it's a "major new feature!"

It's not a major new feature. It's about damn time.

A graphical installer adds ABSOLUTELY nothing to the installation. Unless you're a newbie to Linux (if you are, debian isn't really too suited for you), you will see and understand this. Who the bleeding heck cares how the installation looks? The focus should be on a fast installer that works on as many configurations as possible, not fancy eye-candy.

Re:Support other items out of the installer?

[MrNemesis]

According to the blurb from FTA, the graphical installer supports everything available in the regular curses installer, so yes, support for installing onto LVM and software RAID should work perfectly.

TBH I can't see what all the fuss is about. To my knowledge, Debian has never marketed itself as a general purpose distro for desktops a la Grandma Linux, it's always just been a damned stable system that's particularly suited to servers (it's utterly fantastic to do an apt-get dist upgrade and be 99% certain that nothing will go wrong). Last I heard, Debian were quite content for others to use this as a baseline to extend Debian into the user-friendly market, hence distros like Ubuntu.

Like I keep saying over and over again - there's a place for Debian, just like there's a place for Ubuntu. A corporate server farm doesn't need a GUI installer - they have one of their code-fu's do a single install and then roll out an image to 300 empty boxes via BOOTP. Someone rolling out Debian on the desktop at a company would do much the same thing. If you've wanted a pretty installer that'll make the process easier on the eye, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE have been on the game for years. Do people decry LFS for not having a GUI installer?

Disclaimer: I like and use Debian at home and at work. I've never had any problems with the text mode installer, but likewise I've never had problems telling someone to use Ubuntu for their first distro rather than Debian. Different strokes.

£0.02

Re:Major New Features

[Sketch]

> AFAIK, nor yast nor RedHat eq. is not as powerful and stable as apt-get, so no, it is not just about features, but it is about features done WELL.

I find it funny that everyone says apt-get is what makes Debian great. I've used apt-get for years on Redhat. I'd say it's just as stable as on Debian. Sure, it didn't come installed by the OS but it only took one simple command to install it.

GUI = easy ?

[jimcooncat]

GUI doesn't necessarily mean easy to me.

GUI does mean slow and many times buggier to me.

GUI means (to me) that, unless shown in a text box, long error messages will be truncated or summarized.

That said, I've never installed Debian from scratch. Instructions to get (which?) .iso file are too damned confusing.

I've had no problems with the Ubuntu alternate install. A few years back I was installing Gentoo and though it was involved, I wasn't confused about what to download, thanks to the Handbook.

If they want to market to Joe Average, they should clean up their website.

Re:Install is (1 of) Linux's biggest problem(s)

[massysett]

How do these posts on Linux install being hard get modded up? First, the article was about the installer for Debian Etch, not about individual application installation. Installing Linux is generally *easier* than installing Windows. With Windows you have to search all over the Internet for drivers. Linux usually comes with all the drivers you need and configures them for you.

Second, even if you want to talk about installing apps, it's super easy to go into Synaptic or whatever tool your distro uses, click on something, and install it. Why is it that people think that "I can't install things the exact same way I install things in Windows" equals "it's hard to install things"? If you want to do things the Windows way, use Windows!

Third, I have seen Linux apps that are easy to install "the Windows way." Google Earth is a prime example; Skype is another. Download, click, and use.

Re:Major New Features

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

It's not a major new feature. It's about damn time.

Do all the other distros have an installer that works across 11 arches? (Yes, it's the same back-end across all arches).

The Debian installer is pretty fine IMO - the graphical front end is pretty nice & counts as a major new feature in my book.

Installer Screen shots

[vivekg]

One of its real advantages is that it allows installation in nine new languages that cannot be displayed in the regular installer.

I have also noticed that GUI installer is bit faster than the regular text based regular installer. However, this installer is not as polished as RHEL or Suse Linux GUI installer but project promises to polish it later on... If you are interested you can see Screen shots -
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/wp-content/uploads/2 006/08/debian-testing-gui-installer-1.thumbnail.pn g [cyberciti.biz]
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/wp-content/uploads/2 006/08/debian-testing-gui-installer-paritition-dis ks-2.png [cyberciti.biz]

Re:My favorite installer...

[Reverend528]

Have we got to the stage where granny can install your garden variety linux yet?

No, but to be fair, granny doesn't really know how to install windows or OS X either.

Re:yum or the name "rpm"

[Reverend528]

Or you just like the .deb extension more than .rpm?

Lets face it, before yum, rpm was a pain in the ass. Before yum, rpm users were likely to find themselves in "rpm hell" seeking numerous rpm packages that were required by whatever they sought to install. Many people who migrated to debian or gentoo during that period are likely to have only bad memories of the rpm packaging system.

Re:Major New Features

[garcia]

Regardless of what level of a user you are the installer's looks are meaningless. My current machine (running Debian unstable -- which, as a side note, has been very unstable lately) had Debian installed in October of 2002.

Think it matters much when you will probably use the installer once or twice ever?

Not to me it doesn't.

Re:Newsflash

[wealthychef]

Hmm, modded down as flamebait? Have you learned your lesson? Never say anything critical about Linux at Slashdot, especially if it contains a kernel of truth (no pun intended). Linux is perfect and cannot be criticized, especially mocked or made fun of. You fool!

Re:Major New Features

[Phleg]

At the risk of sounding like a troll, is this not a sign of how far behind the rest of the Linux world Debian has let itself fall? An installation GUI touted as a "major new feature"?

Actually, this is a pretty reasonably significant step forward. Debian lacked a good installation for a long time, simply because of the vast number of architectures it supports. Debian-Installer was written from the ground-up to support all (eleven? thirteen?) architectures that Debian supports, plus provide hooks for CUIs, GUIs, and scriptable interfaces.

While the current iteration of the graphical installer only works on AMD64 and x86, it's only a matter of time before it's supported across all capable architectures.

Also importantly, Debian has finally gotten this done "the right way", in that there aren't any significant hacks to provide nice things like accurate progress indicators, etc., that other graphical installers have used.

And no, I can't think of any other Linux distro that has "caught up" to Debian in terms of packaging. Debian comes with over 15,000 packaged libraries/software, which is a shiton more than other distributions offer (Ubuntu excepted, for obvious reasons). Not only that, but there's simply no comparison between yum and apt.

Re:Graphical Install For Debian?!? Bah!!

[moranar]

Well, the bit about the virgins is true, but if you sacrifice the nerd, who will complete the installation?

Big deal, not

[jones_supa]

Even Sarge's installer is not hard to use. You don't have to do anything from scratch, you just answer questions. If you can't install the system with that, you probably couldn't use it either. There will be a lot to tweak after the installation anyway. Implementing a straightforward installed is probably not one of the biggest problems. It does not count as "major new features".

Re:Too Little, Too Late

[boethius]

This may not counter your position, but Debian *is* the foundation for Ubuntu, which has come out of nowhere and taken the Linux desktop into a position it's often longed to have.

As a community-driven OS, it definitely has its place.

The release cycle for Debian has indeed been glacial at best. I think I lived a few lifetimes and was incarnated a few times while waiting for sarge. I think also everyone involved with Debian acknowledges how horrific their release cycles were. They seem to be getting better.

I wouldn't call it a "nice try" - Debian has a reputation for being stable and risk-averse over the bleeding edge cycles of other distributions. They are arguably the most "BSD-ish" of the Linux distributions in this respect. This is why a lot of server admins, including myself, pick up on using Debian over say CentOS or RHEL. I've used it for years on production systems and have never regretted it.

Re:Major New Features

[00lmz]

Well, here's what the Debian people say [debian.org] (in a section titled "Quality of implementation") -- I've marked the important part :) :

People often say how they came to Debian because of apt-get, or that apt is the killer app for Debian. But apt-get is not what makes the experience so great: apt-get is a feature readily reproduced (and, in my opinion, never equalled), by other distributions -- call it urpmi, apt4rpm, yum, or what have you. The differentiating factor is Debian policy, and the stringent package format QA process (look at things like apt-listchanges, apt-list-bugs, dpkg-builddeps, pbuilder, pbuilder-uml -- none of which could be implemented so readily lacking a policy (imagine listchangelog without a robust changelog format)). It is really really easy to install software on a Debian box.

This resembles cargo cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) religions: that is, apt-get is the visible aspect of Debian's policy system, the same way that cargo-cult practices saw runways and other characteristics as the source of western goods ("cargo"), and built their own replicas, complete with fake wooden headphones for control towers. In the same way, other distributions have created the shallow visible aspect of Debian's packaging infrastructure, without addressing the deep issues of policy. Worse: the conflicts of technical requirements and marketing / economic imperatives often work at cross purposes. Less perversely for most GNU/Linux distros than for proprietary software, but still clearly present.

Red Hat, Mandrake, and other distributions in the class have really massive base installations. Why? I do believe it's because it's a PITA to install software. Even with RPM, it's a kludgey procedure, impossible to codify. With Debian, it was a breeze.

So the killer app is really Debian policy, the security team, the formal bug priority mechanisms, and the policy about bugs (namely: any binary without a man page is an automatic bug report. Any interaction with the user not using debconf is a bug). As the Wiki page Why Debian Rocks (http://twiki.iwethey.org/Main/WhyDebianRocks) puts it:

This is the crux, the narthex, the throbbing heart of Debian and what makes it so utterly superior to all other operating systems. Policy is defined. It is clear. It is enforced through the tools you use every day. When you issue apt-get install foo, you're not just installing software. You're enforcing policy - and that policy's objective is to give you the best possible system.

What Policy defines are the bounds of Debian, not your own actions on the system. Policy states what parts of the system the package management system can change, and what it can't, how to handle configuration files, etc. By limiting the scope of the distribution in this way, it's possible for the system administrator to make modifications outside the area without fear that Debian packages will affect these changes. In essence, Policy introduces a new class of bugs, policy bugs. Policy bugs are release-critical -- a package which violates policy will not be included in the official stable Debian release.

Let me reiterate, because that is the whole secret: A package which violates policy will not be included in the official stable Debian release.