Installing Debian the right way
3.1 The Debian installer
The Debian installer provided withsargeis a new software, developed from scratch to address the shortcomings of the previous Debian installer (boot-floppies, also known by the short name “bf”), and to pave the way for easier maintenance and future extensibility. Over the period of four years, the developers have worked their experience from theboot-floppiesproject into a new, unified architecture for the installation of Debian, independent of the source medium. If you’re familiar with other install programs, the new Debian installer may surprise you. It introduces Debian’s strengths right at the start, and goes a long way towards burying Debian’s reputation for being difficult to install.
One of the biggest points of criticism of Debian has always been the awkwardness and complexity of its installation system. While those experienced with Debian could install a complete system within minutes, the uninitiated haplessly tried to follow the path of least resistance, often failing miserably as the system did not provide a straight line through the process. As a result, numerous Debian-based distributions (see appendix A.2) have clustered like pilot fish around a shark, with their main claim to attention being the easy installation that leaves users with a Debian-compatible system. However, these providers only support a subset of the architectures Debian supports (see chapter 4.5), and thus, the Debian system could never integrate the improvements into the main line4. Furthermore, language
sup-2The default minimal installation consists of 123 packages, which take up 97 Mb. This also includes the accompanying documentation, log files, and temporary data.
3The smallest Debian system that can still be called a Unix system consists of 89 packages and consumes 84 Mb of space.
4For what it is worth, some effort went into using Progeny’s installer for the Debian system, but the installation system was not modular and flexible enough to be extended to all eleven architectures.
port has always been a problem. While the Debian system supports almost 40 lan-guages, most Debian installation systems provided English, or a handful different languages at most.
The problems with the previous installation system had far-reaching effects. On the one hand, Debian slowly but strongly gained the reputation of being a distribution for cracks and hackers, and anyone not glued to the keyboard would be unable to use it. On the other hand, those who did succeed at installing the system joined what was perceived to be an elitarian crowd around the Debian project, which apparently did not care enough to make a move and improve their users’ experience (and widen their user base).
As it turns out, the Debian project has been aware of the problems and has been working actively to solve them. However, as good things take time, it took four years until all the requirements of a new installer had been met, which has also been among the primary factors of the delay ofsarge.
3.1.1 Features of the new installer
The new installer continues to be unglamourously text-based, but work on graph-ical front-ends has begun5. The installer does provide many enhancements which should improve users’ experience while not limiting the expert — an approach found throughout the Debian system.
The installer is fully documented online6for all architectures and the most popular languages. A list of frequently asked questions is also available7.
The features of the new installer include the following:
Modular architecture
The installer is built out of a multitude of modules working hand-in-hand.
This allows for easy customisation of the installer (see chapter 8.3.3) and provides for ease of maintenance.
Hardware detection
The new installation system useshw-detectand thediscoverhardware de-tection utility to determine the hardware present in a system. The set of hardware these two can detect is limited to the devices supported by the kernel. While it is likely that a recent 2.4 series kernel will power thesarge installer by default, a 2.6 kernel can be used instead to allow detection of newer devices.
Expert mode
While the installer allows access to a plethora of parameters to those who
5http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/gtk-frontend
6http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual
7http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ
want it, the number of questions thrown at the average user is kept to a minimum.
Improved partitioning
A new partitioning system combines support for all major filesystems with the ability to move, copy, and resize partitions. Furthermore, Redundant Ar-ray of Independent Disks (RAID) and Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volumes can be configured prior to the creation of the filesystems.
Wireless LAN (WLAN) configuration
What worked sporadically in the oldwoodyis now an integrated feature:
Debian-supported WLAN drivers can be used throughout and for the instal-lation8.
Architecture support
Support for all architectures has been improved. For instance, installations onpowerpcrun much smoother than before, andx86now usesGrubas the bootloader.
Easy customisation
The installer has been designed with maintainability in mind. In addition to its modular design, this provides an easy way to create customised installers for specific requirements.
Boot media
Also thanks to the modular design, Debian now has ability to support a wider range of boot media. The more advanced include: Pre-boot Execution En-vironment (PXE) (which is not strictly new,boot-floppiesalready supported it), and Universal Serial Bus (USB) sticks.
Internationalisation
The installer has been translated into 40 languages at the time of writing (and 10 more are under active development). In addition to the language, it also supports the associated character sets. Thus, more than two thirds of the world population can use the installer in their native language.
3.1.2 System requirements
Debian GNU/Linux does not ask much. Nevertheless, some minimum requirements must be met for the system to run. Not essential but very useful is a CD-ROM
8The set of drivers provided by Debian’s kernel includes popular products, featuring chips by Wave-lan and Prism, among others. Unfortunately, the Intel PRO Wireless cards, used in many Centrino laptops, are currently not supported for the installation due to licencing problems (see chapter 2.3). The drivers can be easily built for Debian (fromipw2100-sourceandipw2200-source, see chapter 8.1.3) and integrated in a customised version of the installer (see chapter 8.3.3).
or DVD-ROM drive, and a Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) capable of booting from these drives9. Debian can be installed using only a network connection, or bootstrapped onto a hard disk temporarily connected to a second computer (both of which will be discussed in this chapter), but the preferred and most popular method is the bootable CD.
To run the Debian installer, you need at least 24 Mb of Random Access Mem-ory (RAM) (and even less on some other architectures). If you are interested in bootstrapping an embedded system with less memory available, it is probably best to use the method laid out in chapter 8.3.1.
For sensible operation of a minimal system, 256 Mb of hard disk space is required for a new partition . It is possible to squeeze the system into a smaller space, but log files and APTand dpkgcaches like to have more space available. A system spanning 256 Mb will not provide more than the mere essentials, and a graphical user interface will not fit. A common workspace installation will consume around 2 Gb, excluding data, and leaving little room for additional programmes. For servers, it is advisable to provide more space for/varand/or/srv. Generally, the more the merrier, which should not pose a problem with the storage capacities available these days.
Lastly, the system should have a means to connect to the network. Installing over the network is the smoothest way, and Unix was made for the Net after all. Debian supports Peer-to-Peer Protocol (PPP) and PPP-over-Ethernet (PPPoE), but so-called
“WinModems”10 are not natively supported. Most Ethernet and WLAN adapters are supported, including those found integrated in consumer motherboards. In general, the Debian installer does not provide drivers beyond those available in the kernel. Thus, if it works with Linux, it works with Debian, andvice versa.