-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
It is my pleasure to announce the first public alpha of debian-installer, the next-generation installation system for Debian. Debian-installer is modeled after some of the points which make Debian so hugely successful: good configuration management (debconf, in a C reimplementation), good package management (through anna, whose acronym expands to anna's not nearly apt) and other custom, sized-down versions of the standard Debian tools like dpkg. For those who want to test the installer immediately, images are available at http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/local-di-sarge.iso http://people.debian.org/~tfheen/d-i/images/2002-12-07/cvs/ Feel free to try other images than those listed above, but if you do, please use the latest version and note the exact version (URL and md5sum) in the insallation report. The first alpha is only available for i386. The other ports are progressing nicely, but the Debian Installation Team does not feel that they are ready for the alpha release. Currently, it should be possible to install a fully-functional Debian system off a CD-ROM or off the Internet without having to resort to manual hacking, using reasonably off-the-shelf hardware. The installer still has some rough edges, like no proper progress bar. We hope those will be remedied when the time for the next alpha, or the first beta comes. Debian-installer uses debconf for nearly all user communication. That means that even though the interface currently employed is a line-based interface, it is quite easy to switch that with another interface, like S-Lang or GTK. Those frontends are, however, not ready enough for alpha. So, the installer does not look too pretty right now. Other missing, but to-be-implemented features are more backends for debconf, like a HTTP database backend for getting default answers, nor are automated installations or replication of installs ready yet. Those are being worked on, however. As written above, the installer still has some rough edges. Among those is a problem with the autodetection of RTL8139-based NICs. The kernel module changed name between 2.2 and 2.4, and discover-data, which has the data used by autodetection, is still using the old names. This will be fixed once discover 2 hits the archive. Also, if you mistype your mirror information, it is not possible to reenter that information. On boot, you'll get a few "Cannot load module" messages from kmod. Those are harmless. Some areas of debian-installer are less tested than others, and we would especially welcome feedback on those areas. The SCSI autodetection and boot loader installation has been tested a lot less than IDE. CD-ROM installs are less tested than network installs, so help there would be appreciated. PCMCIA work has not begun, so if it installs on a laptop, it will be by accident. All, absolutely all testing reports should be filed as bug reports against the installation-reports pseudo-package. Not sent to me. Not to some other random Debian developer. Not pasted on IRC. Filed as bugs. A template on what information we want is available at http://raw.no/d-i/report-template.html . The template is also available in /root/install-report.template after the installation has completed. This makes our job a whole lot easier, since we can discuss and look at installation reports in one place. A special thanks go out to Martin Sj�gren, Anthony Towns and Adam Heath, for great contributions in their respective areas. Also, great thanks go out to all the porters for their suggestions, ideas and code which has helped make debian-installer less i386-centric and Linux-centric than it else would have been. As always, feedback in all forms, be it testing reports, flames, ideas, patches or cheers are appreciated. - -- Tollef Fog Heen ,''`. UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' : `. `' `- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Please see my GPG key at http://www.opera.com/~tfheen/gpgkey.asc iD8DBQE98n5SQSseMYF6mWoRAtOyAKCZ6jBEIAPV3EiYNl+3eza0fqx6YgCgoZYU bTfe1uftscH+syFRg/3YGr8= =vCJZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
