Debian: Installer continues to improve

I really like the new Debian installer. This should ease the pain for newbies and send all the comments from critics of Debian's installation process > /dev/null. Wonderful work Debian team!

I thought the old installer was pretty simple. I realize it would be difficult for someone who doesn't already know a little something about Linux though so hopefully it will turn more people on to Debian, a very excellent distro.

I hate to harp on this, as it's a touchy issue, but until Debian comes out with a graphical installer (ala Fedora's anaconda, SuSE's YaST, Mandrake's installer) it's not going to draw the numbers those distros have. I'm not saying ncurses is bad, I'm just saying a lot of newbies are daunted by text installers. Please spare me the "well, it can't be done because..." line as well. It can be done, even if it means it won't work on all 200 languages and 15 architectures (the numbers are just a guess, I can't remember the exact stats). This message was edited Oct 5, 2004 9:48 AM

It actually *has* been done many times over. It's just that they name the distro something else after creating the fancy installer. There are very many Debian based distros out there, some that don't even need to be installed (KNOPPIX, etc). I know what you are saying though. There could be a Fedora-like graphical install at least as an option, heck it's all GPL so they certainly can reuse the ideas and possibly some of the code.

Right after I posted that I realized I've actually *used* several Debian-based distros that have nice graphical installers (Mepis, Knoppix, etc), so yes, it HAS been done.. And I agree, it doesn't necessarily have to be *the* way to install Debian, but at least an option to install graphically would be nice. I mean, they cater to so many different languages and architectures, why not one more choice of text vs graphical?