So there seems to be a lot of confusion on this thread about how various architectures influence the debian installer. Let me try to clear some of the incorrect statements up.. - "discover only available for i386" Actually discover is built for all our architectures. Hardware detection is generally not as much of a problem on other architectures though, that do not have the plethora of crap hardware that has to be dealt with on i386. An imac is an imac is an imac. Sun has only put out so much sparc hardware, etc. The kernel does rather a better job of detecting hardware on other architectures than we i386 folk are used to. - "woody doesn't use discover because we have to support the lowest common denominator" The debian X setup program in woody has been able to use discover, read-edid, and mdetect in combination for a long time. This trio can pretty well autodetect your video card, monitor and mouse, on new-ish i386 hardware. The reason you have probably not seen this in action is due to a bug in the woody installer, that does not *install* the trio of packages before setting up X. This is due to insufficient testing. It's probably fixed in unstable, but has again not received enough testing for me to really know if it works right. The new debian-installer project uses all the hardware detection it can, on any given architecture. One of its design goals is to allow for noninteractive, fully autodetected installs. Supporting the lowest common denominator (ie, boot floppies and ISA bus machines :-P) is not really holding debian-installer back, instead it contributed to it having a very flexible, modular design. - "debian is hard to install because of politics" There is really no political cabinet who have decided that debian needs to be hard to install and that if it doesn't work on a s390 console install we won't do it. Really there's not. What there is is a group of people who are mostly working on whatever area of the system they feel needs work. Most of these people have installed debian 3 or fewer times in the past year, and it worked ok 2 out of 3 times; the third install had some minor problem that they hacked around fairly easily. So most of these people do not work on first-time debian installation at all, and instead concentrate on improving the upgrading process that they have done hundreds of times in the past year. Then there is a small group of people who have day jobs which involve installing or selling debian, or who have installed debian more than ten times in a given day. These people are very interested in making the installation better, so they work on that. Some of them create debian-derived distributions for specific targets, and not all of their work ends up rolled back into debian. Some few are able to use debian directly and make larger contributions to the installer. There are very few of these folk, and they're still being pulled in all different directions, seeing different requirements, being interested in installing debian on different hardware, and so on. This doesn't make for fast progress in any given direction. Folk move between these various categories all the time. This doesn't smell of politics to me. -- see shy jo
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