Re: Easier installer?
Hi Wouter
On 16/11/2017 13:53, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> At $DAYJOB I'm currently supporting a piece of software for which I
> provide binary packages for a number of distributions. As part of that,
> I find myself having to install a Fedora or CentOS VM occasionally.
At my $DAYJOB(s) I work on all kinds of custom Debian images. Often,
having a system that's easy to install is of much higher priority than
compatibility with debian-installer and sometimes even many other things
such as features (more about that later).
That's why I'm maintaining the Calamares (https://calamres.io) package
for Debian. It's a 3rd party installer that some derivatives use. I'm
using it in AIMS Desktop, I'm linking there since we have more
screenshots than the upstream site:
https://desktop.aims.ac.za/getting-started/
I find Calamares significantly easier to use than pretty much any other
installer that's available. A long term plan is to drive d-i with it in
the background, so that the UI will gather all the options and just do
some preseeding. The main reason that it's in Debian right now is so
that derivatives who uses Calamares doesn't have to repeat all the
packaging work, but I'm also working on a package called
calamares-settings-debian, which when it is installed, will configure
standard Debian live media to be installable using Calamares. (it will
also be an example for derivatives who want to use it).
Calamares currently does have some shortcommings. For partitioning, it
doesn't do RAID or LVM, in these cases you have to use d-i. For the next
round of custom ISOs I'm releasing I plan to have both d-i and calamares
as options form the ISO boot menu.
If you'd like to give calamares a shot, I also maintain a relatively
minimilistic debian+gnome+calamares iso that you can try out, the latest
build I did is here:
https://download.bluemosh.com/iso/debmo/debmo-17.09-buster-amd64.iso
Some people have brought up the topic of whether we should consider
Calamares for the Debian live media by default. I think it would need
some further discussion, since we don't really want two default
installers in debian, and we also don't want users to get confused and
file Calamares bugs against d-i. However, I do think Calamares has its
merits and upstream has been great in adding more features. I also think
providing both on the iso is not that a bad option and we can make it
clear in Calamares that it's a 3rd party installer and add instructions
on how to user reportbug to report bugs against it right from the installer.
Feedback on any of the above is welcome :)
-Jonathan
Reply to: