[nmglug] Ubuntu / Debian Installer

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 12:52 -0600, Anthony Martinez wrote:
> It's a text-based installer, but really, does it matter? Text interfaces may not
> have the "oooh pretty" eyecandy deal to them, but they're far more efficient
> than graphical installers, IMHO.

Right.  The Debian Installer: 

  http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

has a superior design over the Anaconda installer used by Fedora and Red
Hat.  D-I is very modular and flexible.  It uses the three tier MVC
architecture of 'debconf'.  Because of this, a graphical front-end could
be created for it relatively easily.  I believe there may be ongoing
work to create one based on a frame-buffer port of GTK+.

D-I is based on 'udeb' packages that can be loaded dynamically, at
run-time, to extend the installer in arbitrary ways.  It uses a
dependency based system, where one package that provides something like
"created file systems" depends on one that provides something like
"partitioned hard drive".  'udeb' packages can come from CD-ROM
installation media, found on a hard drive file system, NFS, or be
downloaded via HTTP or FTP.  The Live-CD is possible due to a
combination of a udeb called 'casper' (apt-get source casper) and some
special drop-in boot scripts found in the 'ubuntu-live' package.

The use of 'debconf' allows "pre-seeding" the answers you give during
installation.  Look on the installer CD in the preseed directory and
you'll see what they look like.  There is an example custom preseed file
in the documentation directory.  The 'kickstart' support is also based
on 'debconf' pre-seeding.

D-I supports a serial console, for headless server installs, and also
has a network console based on SSH.  I believe that with that, it is
possible to install to a headless machine using an ssh connection.  It
can display in any of at least 30 languages.

If I was a Fedora fanatic, I would seriously look into adopting D-I,
just as they have adopted 'apt'.  Actually, I would be upgrading to
Ubuntu.  :-)

-- 
Karl Hegbloom <karlheg at laclinux.com>
Los Alamos Computers, Technical Support