Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
On Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 11:30:48PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: [Christian Perrier] Still, that doesn't indeed prevent anybody to develop a specific component that could be run *before* D-I, then preseed D-I variables so that it later runs completely unattended. I believe I saw a comment making me believe the live CD installer in Ubuntu have something like this. Anyone know more? Sort of; that was kind of the initial idea. But in practice it's an independently-designed installer that uses d-i components as some of its backends for as much commonality of implementation as it can manage, not a straightforward frontend to d-i. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110905095404.ga13...@riva.dynamic.greenend.org.uk
Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
[Christian Perrier] Still, that doesn't indeed prevent anybody to develop a specific component that could be run *before* D-I, then preseed D-I variables so that it later runs completely unattended. I believe I saw a comment making me believe the live CD installer in Ubuntu have something like this. Anyone know more? Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2fl39gc0zcn@login1.uio.no
Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
Harald Dunkel wrote: Recently I had the chance to install openSUSE 10.3 (2007) in a virtual machine. Instead of many dedicated menus in a chain Suse presents one big screen giving an overview over the most important installation options and their current settings (e.g. location, partitioning, which packages to install, etc.). Harri, I'm not part of any installer project, so I speak only as a user. Yes, openSUSE installer sounds very nice for that particular application. Now look at the number of architectures supported by openSUSE and the number of architectures supported by Debian. Many more for Debian, yes? Including some tiny systems with no graphical interface, and some very large systems of thousands of nodes that must be installed without user interaction. Now look at the number of languages supported by Debian Installer, counting both text and graphical modes. How many does that pretty openSUSE installer support? (And by 'support' I mean a very high percentage of all text translated into that language, not just a locale setting.) Debian Installer may be operated remotely via SSH or even serial link. Can openSUSE installer? Check DistroWatch for the number of active distros based on Debian, and the number based on openSUSE. Big difference, yes? Debian Installer is designed to support rebranding for such use, if they so choose. Does any openSUSE installer, ancient or modern, support all that? Debian Installer does. *ONE* Debian Installer project. Not multiple forks and incompatible derivatives. But if you like that pretty openSUSE installer, much happiness for you. When it finishes you have an openSUSE system. When Debian Installer finishes I have a Debian GNU/Linux system, and I may never have to see the installer again. Perhaps there is a reason openSUSE spends so much effort making a pretty installer? --Don -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/99u16716kmf6ptmj6ujl2mqidvedg51...@4ax.com
Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi Don, On 09/02/11 18:49, Don Wright wrote: Harald Dunkel wrote: Recently I had the chance to install openSUSE 10.3 (2007) in a virtual machine. Instead of many dedicated menus in a chain Suse presents one big screen giving an overview over the most important installation options and their current settings (e.g. location, partitioning, which packages to install, etc.). [snip] But if you like that pretty openSUSE installer, much happiness for you. When it finishes you have an openSUSE system. When Debian Installer finishes I have a Debian GNU/Linux system, and I may never have to see the installer again. Perhaps there is a reason openSUSE spends so much effort making a pretty installer? --Don I would guess they tried to make it easy to install? Surely my intention was not to put d-i into a bad light or to claim that openSUSE is better. Of course every distro has its strengths, and Debian is top on most. I did not mean to start a flame war, but to suggest to give openSUSE's installer a try, just to see how it works. Maybe some ideas (like the big configuration window instead of asking for [OK] or [BACK] on every screen) can be useful for Debian, too. Just hoping to make the good even better. Regards Harri -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk5hHysACgkQUTlbRTxpHjeBzACeKbVd2dpKPNGt7KH7zHgxWf/T dM0An0cF4aIidhms+q0k31YN52LdW6S4 =qRgZ -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e611f30.5060...@afaics.de
Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
Harald Dunkel wrote: I did not mean to start a flame war, but to suggest to give openSUSE's installer a try, just to see how it works. Maybe some ideas (like the big configuration window instead of asking for [OK] or [BACK] on every screen) can be useful for Debian, too. I understand that, and did not take it as flaming. I even share a preference for 'parallel' setup screens as opposed to 'serial' questions, but understand some of the constraints of D-I make this more difficult, such as the limited space on a businesscard image or the performance penalty of a screen refresh over a serial link. All Linux has much more in common as family than with other operating systems, or even different releases from the same company. However, when you come into the locker room of a football team and express admiration for another team, you should expect some 'trash talk' about their weaknesses as well. Mostly I replied because the Debian Project (which includes Debian Installer) seems to have many goals and constraints that other distros have not shared. This leads to design choices for the installer that make it appear less sophisticated in the eyes of some reviewers, and public opinion about Debian has suffered from that. The fact that installing Linux is increasingly a one-time event for many distros has been lost amid much discussion of how to make this one-time event look good to users of other operating systems, especially those where reboot, reinstall, replace is common. Over the years I have watched D-I go through a gradual process of continuous improvement, and certainly expect more changes in the future. The graphical installer interface, which improved support for some languages and managed to consolidate a few prompts, is one example. If a better presentation can be arranged without hurting the capabilities I mentioned earlier, I'm sure that will be tested and accepted as such contributions have been in the past. --Don -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/ss8267ljurqc095ut940minmn3vsod6...@4ax.com
Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
On Fri, Sep 02, 2011 at 02:42:50PM -0500, Don Wright wrote: I understand that, and did not take it as flaming. I even share a preference for 'parallel' setup screens as opposed to 'serial' questions, but understand some of the constraints of D-I make this more difficult, such as the limited space on a businesscard image or the performance penalty of a screen refresh over a serial link. All Linux has much more in common as family than with other operating systems, or even different releases from the same company. However, when you come into the locker room of a football team and express admiration for another team, you should expect some 'trash talk' about their weaknesses as well. Mostly I replied because the Debian Project (which includes Debian Installer) seems to have many goals and constraints that other distros have not shared. This leads to design choices for the installer that make it appear less sophisticated in the eyes of some reviewers, and public opinion about Debian has suffered from that. The fact that installing Linux is increasingly a one-time event for many distros has been lost amid much discussion of how to make this one-time event look good to users of other operating systems, especially those where reboot, reinstall, replace is common. Over the years I have watched D-I go through a gradual process of continuous improvement, and certainly expect more changes in the future. The graphical installer interface, which improved support for some languages and managed to consolidate a few prompts, is one example. If a better presentation can be arranged without hurting the capabilities I mentioned earlier, I'm sure that will be tested and accepted as such contributions have been in the past. I wonder how the suse installer would get along with brltty or a screen reader. And d-i certainly works quite well, certainly much nicer than boot-floppies used to be (especially when it came to trying to modify the code). The one thing I remember from using the suse installer once a number of years ago was that doing a netinstall it had no ftp servers or anything listed. The user had to look that up themselves and type it in. What a pain that was. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110902202937.gx15...@caffeine.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Re: d-i vs openSUSE's ancient installer
Quoting Harald Dunkel (ha...@afaics.de): That was really exciting. No click-next-to-continue orgy just to accept the defaults. Within 2 minutes the basic configuration was done, even though the installer was new to me. The main reason I thik this is something completely impossible to apply to D-I is that options in D-I are dynamic and most of them depend on the context. Just look, for instance, how the main menu looks along an install (you have to do a medium priority install for this). Options are added while the installation is being performed as their need depends on choices made by users in previous steps. This is what makes it IMHO impossible to apply the concept of a single choices screen to be applied to D-I. That screen would first have to be entirely dynamic : any change in any choice would affect the content of other choices...or even add more choices to the screen. Not saying this is not doablebut IMHO not doable by still preserving the versatility of D-I (graphical interface, dialog-based interface, full text-mode installs, etc). We even have a bug report for user-setup where it is suggested to have only one screen for userlogin, real name and passwordand where we have valid objections against that...because each choice has an influence on others. So imagine if we tried to only have one screen. So, OpenSUSE installer is perfect for installing an i386/amd64 desktop, single-user machine? Fine. As others said, would that fit with current choice of scalability we did for D-I. As others answered, no. Still, that doesn't indeed prevent anybody to develop a specific component that could be run *before* D-I, then preseed D-I variables so that it later runs completely unattended. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
