Re: debian installation
Let's not blur the truth here. Debian *is* a lot more difficult to install
than RedHat. Mostly this is a "polishing" issue, rather than a technology
issue, but the truth is RedHat is polished and Debian is not. FreeBSD
also has a more polished install.
I think that Debian has a much better technology, but the average Debian
user right now gets to stare at all the whirling gears in the install,
and sometimes tinker with them, to get things going. The average RedHat
user watches a status bar crawl across their screen. Or yet another
metaphor: Debian has built a solid structure, but not yet done all
the drywalling, or hung the front door in its frame.
No flames please: I did wipe RedHat off all my Linux systems and replace
it with Debian, because I'm enough of a geek to see through the polishing
and realize that what Debian is offering underneath is better.
- -
Here is my list of things that need to be fixed up to make Debian's install
go as nicely as other installs do. For reference, the competition, in my
mind, is RedHat and FreeBSD. Both have much nicer installs, even if their
package managers lack Debian's sophistication.
Here are the points about Debian's install that need to be fixed:
* Ask all the questions up front. Don't make the user sit in front
of the machine watching emacs byte compile stuff between questions
* Make better re-use of answers to questions. Don't make the user
say five times what their email address is, packages should
notice that a question has already been answered in response to
some other package's needs, and not bother asking again
* Ask fewer questions. During the install, half the time Debian has
the right answer already as a default--in most of these cases it
would be just fine to go ahead and not ask. For example, how many
people REALLY care whether "gv" or "ghostview" is used to read
postscript files by default?
* Hide some more moving parts. I don't really need to see the
intermediate results of Debian scanning my CD to find the
only archive that's there.
Most important of all, there should be an "express install" option
where you supply a little bit of information, and put your trust in
Debian's defaults. The other side of the coin is that, once it's
installed, there should be a tool for looking over those defaults
and possibly altering them.
Most of these are just UI cleaning issues and window dressing. I think,
though, that they would make a lot of people a lot happier about the
installation process. Remember that this is the first exposure most
people have to Debian--it will be weeks before they begin to see the
value of a package manager that can do sensible upgrades (ie: because
it will be weeks before they need to do that). In the meantime they
will be grumbling about the "ugly" install.
If they are annoyed by a few other things, they may quit Debian before
they realize it's value.
- -
One or two of these points might raise some deeper technical issues.
For example--is there a good way for the package manager to extract
a list of all the questions it needs answers to in advance?
The ideal solution would be it analyzes everything you are going to
install and presents you with all the questions before it begins
the download.
If that can't be done, then there should be a "default answers"
template that gets run early in the install and saves the default
answers somewhere. When a package has a question, first it looks
in the default answers, and only if the answer isn't there, does
it bother the user.
The installer could then ask a bunch of carefully selected questions
at the start and create this default answers file. For a standard
install, there would then be no questions for the user to answer
after that--because the installer intentionally asked all the
things that standard packages need answers to.
Standard packages should try as much as possible to rely on the
same answers.
I'm really talking off the top of my head here, because I haven't
looked into what the Debian packages already do. For all I know,
some mechanism like this already exists and just isn't being
used well enough.
At any rate, I'm done now.
Justin
On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 04:00:14AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> Julian Taylor wrote:
> >
> > Wahyu,
> >
> > > From: "wahyu indrianto" <indria_28@hotmail.com>
> > > Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:16:26 JAVT
> > >
> > > Dear all,
> > > I'm begineer for using debian, it's first time for me to innstall.
> > > but I have problem for using. After I'm finised my installation the
> > > software cannot be use. I try to call XF86Setup they couldn't work.
> > > Please tell me what's wrong.
> >
> > Debian, admittedly, is one of the most primitive Linux
> > installations I've ever used. Among the problems are
> > the fact that no matter what you tell it during
> > installation about your intended configuration, it
> > sets everything up not to work. You'll find the same
> > problem with ppp which is most likely set up to deny
> > all access and printing which is most likely not set
> > up at all.
> >
> > You have to read each of the HOWTO's and manually
> > configure each thing. This can sometimes be difficult
> > because different flavors of Linux make subtle changes
> > to the base so some of the HOWTO's don't apply any
> > more (Caldera and yp fer instance). Since I still
> > haven't managed to fully configure my Debian system,
> > all I know is that the HOWTO isn't always enough. I
> > grabbed my XF86Config from Slackware Linux and it
> > worked OK. I'll be glad to send you a copy of it as
> > a start.
> >
> > If this becomes too frustrating, install Slackware or
> > Caldera Linux. They have some problems too, but after
> > installation, they're configured to work.
> >
> > Julian
>
>
> You know I once bought into the idea that RedHat is easy to
> install and Debian wasn't. Because of this, when a relative
> wanted to try Linux, I, believing the buzz, suggested trying RH
> first. I was wrong, he ended up facing the same problems I faced
> when installing an earlier Debian many moons ago. Specifically he
> couldn't get ppp working. The last time I installed Debian, it
> had pppconfig which worked flawlessly for me. Now, I believe that
> the ease of install depends entirely on the hardware of the box
> being installed onto, and not the distribution. If Linux is happy
> with the hardware and its configuration, i.e. standard serial
> mouse on ttyS0, hayes standard modem (not PnP) on ttyS1, etc, then
> the install will be virtually painless regardless of whether you
> are installing Debian, RH, Caldera, etc.
>
>
> --
> Ed C.
>
>
> --
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