Re: Another "testing" vs "unstable" question

[John Summerfield <debian@ComputerDatasafe.com.au>]

Simon Kitching wrote:

> > I can (and used to) install RHL 7.3 on arbitrary local-computershop 
> > hardware in fifteen minutes, fully automated.
> >
> > I gather the name Ian Murdock has some significance here, and that he's  
> > connected to Progeny. Here's what Progeny says, "Red Hat's® Anaconda is 
> > the standard installer among Linux distributions. Our port of Anaconda 
> > to Debian brings the familiar installation experience of Anaconda to the 
> > rest of the Linux world."
> >
> > See http://platform.progeny.com/anaconda/
> >    
>
> And those comments also point out that Progeny's Anaconda port is
> x86-specific. Debian supports a much wider range of hardware than Red
> Hat does.
>
> So Anaconda for debian (+RH hardware discovery) is nice for people with
> x86 hardware, but *everyone* can use the new debian-installer and its
> hardware-discovery framework (which also happens to be largely developed
> by Progeny: see http://platform.progeny.com/discover/index.html).
>  

Anaconda isn't X86-specific.. As I recall it runs on all current IBM 
hardware (it didn't originally run on S/390 & zSeries). Red Hat 
currently supports IA32, IA64, AMD-64, PPC/Power and S/390 & zSeries. I 
don't recall when Anaconda was introduced, if it was _before_ RHL 7.0 
then it also supports  Sparc (I have a Sparc with RHL 6.2 installed, 
Woody didn't want to install on the box).

Yellowdog Linux is essentially RHL ported to the Mac so Anaconda would 
be working on the Mac too.

The only serious problem with Anaconda is it requires significant RAM.