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An anonymous reader writes "With everyone around talking about how Woody has an outdated installer and lacks some new packages and hardware support, some people feel the urge to get to work.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

Cool

[The Bungi]

Certainly bridges the gap between the Supersize-me 700MB live CDs like Knoppix and the minimalist 10MB vim+kernel+GNU deals.

Should be good even for doing basic partitioning and FS prep before putting in a full distro.

Writing an installer? Make it portable. Please.

[dotz]

What I'd really like to see would be something universal and portable:

• divide the installer code wisely, you will have UI part and the installer part (that does actual work, system-dependent) separated.
• GUI? It shouldn't be that hard. XFree86 for graphics installer are the same everywhere;
• Want to instal via serial port? No problem, just add another user interface module
• High-level language, not C. Sorry, C programs just need too much time to debug, and I don't see where would you have any benefits of using C in case of installer (installation process always takes time, and it mostly depends on HDD or network throughput)
• There are some OS, that lack an easy graphics mode installer. They could benefit

That would of course need a few megabytes of RAM and an isntallation CD. Is anyone booting off from floppy disks anyway? (what's a floppy disk, BTW?)

Anaconda

[Guspaz]

I never understood why Debian doesn't simply use Anaconda. It's opensource, portable to Debian, and everybody who uses it seems generally pleased with it.

Woody's "up to date"

[Ianoo]

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

Question about using non-standard installers

[astrashe]

I hope this isn't a dumb question, but...

Do non-standard installers have an effect on security updates?

I've wondered about that with livecd distros that can set up debian systems on a hard disk. If they draw their packages from standard sources, you'd have to figure that the updates would come through ok.

But what about the things the installer itself sets up? Does it all come from packages that will be updated, or does some of the system come from files on the install media that aren't covered by package update?