[wellylug] Fun and games with the new Debian Installer

[Sam Cannell]

Those of you who use one of Those Other Distributions(tm) may not have
heard about the new debian installer currenty available when installing
sarge or sid (testing and unstable respectively).  The first I heard of
it was in a recent 
Slashdot article though it's been in the sid tree since march.  It
supports supports a bunch of fun new stuff that I won't go into here -
the website explains it far better than I'd be able to here - see the
end of this email for the link.

I'd decided to spend some time this evening looking into doing a
pxe-initiated Debian install for the laptop that was mentioned on the
wlug_org list earlier this week, and decided to have a look at the new
installer at the same time.  Getting the pxe booting working was
somewhat tedious, but didn't cause too many troubles.  If anyone is
interested, I'll jot down a few notes about the steps I took to do it.

In any case, the sarge installer is very impressive.  It's far more
intuitive than the one used in Potato an Woody, but doesn't lose much
(if any) functionality.

As with the Woody installer, the first prompts are for the language and
keyboard layout.  Immediately after, it appears to probe for hardware.
It found my network card, and immediately attempted to use dhcp to
auto-configure it.

Partitioning can either be done automatically by the installer or
manually by the user.  If automatic partitioning is installed, it gives
three options for the partitioning scheme - one partition for the whole
filesystem; two partitions - /home/ and the rest; or "multi-user
system", where (I think) var, home, usr, boot and / are all separate.

The installation of the base system was no different to Woody, except it
prompted me for the release I wanted to use.  Although I had all three
options - stable, testing and unstable, I'm fairly sure that the
requisite components won't exist in stable until sarge gets promoted.

The only real gripe I had with it is although it detected my network
card with no problems during the installation sequence, it didn't load
the module on the first boot.  I had to manually load e1000 and bring up
the eth0 interface.  Although this is not a big issue, it would
certainly be confusing from a novice's perspective.  It's also worth
noting that I was using the March 15 version of the installer, and
there's an April 27 build in the sid tree - the issue I had may well
have been fixed.

So all in all I'm very impressed, and I'm fairly confident that we'll be
able to do a pxe install on Jonny Martin's laptop with no major issues
:)

- Sam

----
Debian Installer project page:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Slashdot article:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/17/0042253&mode=nest
ed&tid=185&tid=189&tid=190&tid=90