> Of course, when you do such things as a new installer, you have additional
> work in porting it. Another choice would have been to use old boot-floppies
> on those archs that are not that well supported by d-i. But it was a
> decision made by someone that all archs should use the new d-i. Complaining
> afterwards that your own decision puts some more work on you is somewhat
> strange, eh?
>
In experience FAI is better suited to installing older/slower machines then
d-i. I doubt we need a single installer which can install debian on every
platform which can run debian. People using debian on older/slower machines
have different requirements for an installer then newbie endusers or people
wanting to deploy debian on a lot of machines. A good installer for
older/slower machines needs to provide the following features :
+ Easy to hack on. Preferably without requiring compilation.
+ Use as few system resources as possible.
+ Provide a reasonable shell environment in the installer. Helps in
debugging problems during the install (which are more likely to happen
on less used platforms).
Some features which are less important :
+ Provide a lot of ways to install the system. netboot + net install is
enough for all the machines I know of. A lot of older machines don't
have a removable storage device by default anyway. An ethernet driver
is typically also one of the first device drivers to be implemented.
+ Provide extensive device probing and auto configuration. Having a
quick and reliable installer which gives a basic configured system is
more important then having all the devices configured automatically
and introducing a bigger risk of installation failure due to kernel
bugs or hardware problems. Kernel bugs and hardware problems are
easier to debug in a full installation then in the more limited
installer environment.
Why I think FAI betters matches these requirements :
+ Uses an NFS root instead of an initrd and udebs.
- This makes it easier to hack on the installer. You just modify the
nfs root and reboot instead of having to rebuild the initrd and the
affected udebs.
- Requires less memory as there is no initrd anymore.
- Faster because it doesn't require installing udebs. All the
necessary packages are already pre-installed in the nfs root.
- The installer environment is much more featureful
+ Uses a preinstalled base.tgz. This again reduces the install time.
Cheers,
Peter (p2).
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