[TAG] Debian Installation

[John Karns]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Rick Moen wrote:

> FYI:  The ncurses installer on Ubuntu's "Alternate Disk" (the _only_
> Ubuntu installer prior to Dapper Drake) is taken directly from Debian,
> altering it pretty much just to supply default answers to some questions
> that would otherwise be asked.

Does that include the hardware detection as well?  I was under the
impression that it was extended / enhanced, although admittedly I'm at a
loss to remember how I arrived at that understanding.


> As Mark Pilgrim puts it, "Ubuntu is an
> ancient African word for 'can't install Debian'."

<chuckle> While I offer kudos for his sense of humor, I'm lazy enough to
prefer not having to drudge through what would probably be several days of
having to sift through individual package installs (for someone who is a
new or relatively new Debian user) to arrive at having a "comfortable"
system configuration.[1]  While I've gone through doing it with other distros
in the past, I think Ubuntu offers a nice shortcut to getting a Debian
based up and running in a very short time.  Now if they just had an ISO
tailored for [56]86 architectures instead of the more vanilla 386.


[1] For an environment which will serve as a system for general personal
use, I find myself installing numerous development libraries, as well as
both KDE And Gnome to support running various multimedia apps, the ability
to compile things like "transcode" (which demanded a lot of schlepping for
auxiliary packages right there), etc anyway, so that tends to cancel out
the advantage of carefully choosing the package set during install for me
anyway.

Of course it's different in cases where one is setting up a server or a
workstation which will have a narrow scope of use.

-- 
John Karns