A Modern Woody Debian GNU/Linux Installer

An anonymous reader writes "With everyone around talking about how Woody has an outdated installer and lacks some new packages and hardware support, some people feel the urge to get to work. The result? A customized installer. It has a 2.4.26 version kernel, supports XFS, LVM, RAID and various hardware drivers. Comes along with vim, bash, you can even resize partitions using parted and you get postfix as the default MTA. It has two flavours, a business card CD and a miniCD version which will help you install a minimal Debian system or even a X Window desktop."

Re:Writing an installer? Make it portable. Please.

[Trepalium]

Is anyone booting off from floppy disks anyway? (what's a floppy disk, BTW?)

It's the thing your BIOS emulates when booting from most el torito bootable CD-ROMs.

Anaconda: Not Interesting (!!!)

[hummassa]

Anaconda only works in x86 (and sparc?), and debian has to install in 11 archs. Understand now?

Re:Writing an installer? Make it portable. Please.

[Elivs]

I think what you want is the new sarge installer [debian.org] that is at RC1 at the momemnt.

Its modular to support all the things you want, and supports 10 archetures at this stage. Being modular should allow people to: script it, put a GUI on it, hardware autodection modules (already done), multiple boot methods (PXE,USB mass-storage,CD-rom...)

Elivs

Re:Yeah but...

[martinde]

> 1. 2.2 kernel

2. Slap forehead, keep woody install CD in CD-Rom drive, reboot, read help by pressing F-whatever it says.
3. Instead of hitting return to boot, follow the directions you found in the help and do "bf24" at the prompt to boot into 2.4
4. Hopefully that gets you going...

I'm not saying woody is perfect - i've had to install PCI ethernet cards too many times because the default kernel won't do modern integrated ones... But it does support 2.4.18 which is much better than 2.2.

Re:Woody's "up to date"

[Anonymous Coward]

How long has kernel 2.6 been out now? Hence, why is this "up-to-date" installer stuck at 2.4?

Because it's installing Woody. And the most recent kernel in Woody is 2.4.

Please read up on the Debian release system before making clueless comments.

The Debian team has already done this

[peripatetic_bum]

Not sure why they started this since Debian has a project called Debian Installer. I have used on some very modern boards and it has really done an amazing job in detecting all my software and running a 2.4 kernel.

Please check out Debian Installer [debian.org]. I think you will be plesantly pleased