[nmglug] nicer debian install CDs

[Sam Noble]

On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 13:35 -0600, Mark Galassi wrote:
> Amigos, I have frequently been annoyed that I can't tell my buddies to
> "do yourself a favor and install Debian".  Why?  Because the installer
> is confusing, and the CD ISO page throws you into a 10-CD set, and it
> talks about jigdo (what are they on??), and the Debian home page says
> nothing about an easy path to install, and the tiny netinst CDs are
> hard to find from http://www.debian.org/
> 
> In our GLUG we (rightly) love Debian, and to help evangelize on it I
> just ran across this page:
> 
> http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/installers.html
> 
> which offers several nice installer approaches.
> 
> Does anyone have experience on them?

Wow that's a lot of 'installers'

I've used several. And I'd say for one off installations, the betas for
the new d-i are quite good. And a co-worker who's been using it more
recently says it's getting better all the time, in fact he said that the
underlying design deserves an award. :)

There'll be pretty front-ends for it soon too.

> Another tip: "quemu" is very nice and quite mature given how ambitious
> its scope is.  I have experimented with GNU/Linux distro installations
> with qemu, and it works!  If you want a pleasant surprise, try the
> very simple sequence:
> 
> $ su
> [...]
> # apt-get -u install qemu
> # control-D
> $ qemu -user-net -cdrom /usr/local/src/KNOPPIX_VERSION.iso
> 
> and see KNOPPIX run.

Wow. that's cool. I just had it boot sysrescd from an iso on an nfs
share. Thanks for the tip Mark.

> If you want to *install* instead of running live-boot you can do
> something like:
> 
> 
> ## to make a 6gig disk:
> dd of=/u/rosalia/qemu/try-diskimage bs=1024 seek=6291456 count=0
> 
> ## then to boot off a CDROM with the UserLinux install disc, and the above hda:
> qemu -user-net -boot d -hda ~/qemu/try-diskimage -cdrom /usr/local/src/UserLinux-netboot.iso
> 
> (then to run that installed system use "-boot c" instead of "-boot d")

Haven't tried this yet but looks like fun. Have you seen PearPC? it can
do similar tricks but emulates a PowerPC (Mac) so you can install
Darwin/OSX on it.

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