Re: Whats with this new Debian installer?
Thomas Adam wrote:
On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 09:46:55AM +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
In the past week I've done two GUI installs. Both were easier than d-i.
"easier".
Easier translates to easier, quicker. All the same benefits one gets
from a GUI desktop can be realised in an installer too.
The only thing against GUI installers is the amount of RAM they require.
However, for new machines that's completely unimportant.
That is not the point. A non-GUI install means that you don't need
to ship with X *just* to install the damn distribution. Using X as a
means to install only increases the level of complexity and this
likelyhood of something going wrong.
With Anaconda, use of the GUI is optional. I'm sure it is with SuSE too,
but it came sans documentation.
Besides, Debian ships with X anyway,
People often assert that increasing complexity increases the probability
of errors and unreliability, but in fact this is not always the case. I
used to be a systems programmer for MVS systems, back when IBM's finest
ran to 16 Mbytes of RAM. A good deal of the complexity of MVS back then
went into prevention of problems such as one job monopolising the CPU
(or other resources) and generally making sure everyone got a fair go,
and from code to recover from errors when they did occur.
There were very few hardware or user errors that could actually take the
system down.
For example, if there was a read error on a tape, it
a) Notices
b) Retried some number of times by backspacing and retrying.
c) Rewinding, spacing back to the same position and retrying some number
of times.
In contrast, a Wang 720C (I think that was the model number) whci was
about equivalent to a peecee in that time ignored read errors on its
tapes. Whoops.
With a curses or similar installer, Ok, you don't have clickie
things but big deal. Who cares? They're usable, intuitive and don't
require lots of RAM to install. It just means that you have to use
the keyboard more often.
I had "clickie things" in DOS. I used to use Turbo Pascal and the mouse
worked very wll then. Didn't need much RAM either, _my_ peecee was
enormous two megabytes of RAM. Can you beleive it!!
Of course, DOS only used 640K.
--
Cheers
John
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