Re: the Debian install process...

[Jouke Witteveen <j.witteveen@mail.ru>]

Wouter Verhelst wrote:

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:43:17AM -0800, Kathryn Tate wrote:
  

I subscribed to this email list to get information on the Debian 
installation experience.

Does Debian have a user friendly installation experience such as SuSE?  
    

Yes

  

Graphical and point and click?
    

No, not that bit. But I think you will find that the Sarge installer is
at least as easy to use as the SuSE installer.

  

Hmm... I only know the netboot installers (works perfect for me) and I still prefer the old Woody method. I do think the Sarge way is the future, but it lacks a couple of things:
- Rescue functionality for the boot disk
- Custom kernel support (see my bug-report http://bugs.debian.org/297553)
- See the list of bug reports on base-installer for more of these arguments
- Personally I prefer dselect above aptitude

The floppydisk net-installer of SuSE was crap but when I finally found all the workarounds for my problems (there were many) I concluded that the Debian installation procedure takes (when both installers work as they were intended to) a bit longer but you get more control than you lose time; when you've done the installation you already have kind of a 'custom' configuration, where you would have the terrible and heavy SuSE kernel 2.6.heavier universal and slow system configuration with a SuSE system (but I must say: YaST _looks_ great).

So just take you're time. When you're not addicted to the WinXP installation (compared to that, SuSE has a cool procedure) you'll manage and maybe, like me, you'll even like or, perhaps, love it...

Regards,
Jouke