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An anonymous reader writes "With everyone around talking about how Woody has an outdated installer and lacks some new packages and hardware support, some people feel the urge to get to work.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."

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Ninnle is the one distro that I feel most comfortable with. It's easy to install, configure, and maintain. People don't know what they're missing.

Modern Woody?

[GregChant]

Isn't this a contradiction? The whole point of a frozen release is that nothing changes. It's what allows Debian to say its system is remarkably stable.

If you change packages or change the kernel, it isn't Woody (the reknowned stable version) anymore, and instead becomes Sid (the more up-to-date, but labeled unstable version).

I wonder what the Debian overlords are going to do with this...

multiple architectures and reduced bandwidth

[jdowland]

The authors should provide a jigdo file. Then, the installer image could be built by hammering the FTP mirrors rather than their own space.

In addition, it would be possible to build such a boot image for non-x86 architectures; the reason of course, why none of these `better' approaches have replaced the current debian installer.

Re:Anaconda: Not Interesting (!!!)

[Guspaz]

How many people run Linux with a printer/teletype as their primary output device? Not enough to care about. A few odd people shouldn't hold back a distribution from getting a usable installer.

Besides, Anaconda has a text installer... I'm sure if one of the three people who need teletype support was desperate, they could create some sort of an output filter to make the text installer support teletype compatible output.

Re:Screenshots!

[Rysc]

# ln -s /usr/bin/apt-get ~/bin/Upgrade\ System
# UpgradeSystem install mozilla
# Upgrade\ System install mozilla-firefox
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
mozilla-firefox-dom-inspector
Suggested packages:
latex-xft-fonts
2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2846 not upgraded.
Need to get 10.5MB of archives.
After unpacking 397kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Of course all of the on-screen text refers to apt, but it can be done.

In serious reply, the reason it's not called Upgrade System is that that's not exactly what it does, and more importantly it's not the only way to do it. APT just happens to have been adopted by Debian. Why say Mozilla and not Web Browser? Because it's not the only web browser. Why say Mozilla and not Internet? Because the web is not the internet. Why say apt-get and not Upgrade System? Because apt is the method being used, and that's not precisely what it does.

Why be accurate instead of "friendly"? Because we tried friendly, and it's better to be accurate if that is the choice.