[TAG] Debian Installation

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John Karns (johnkarns at gmail.com):

> 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.

I don't think so.  

The current "debian-installer" ("d-i") program used in Debian 3.0
"Sarge" and later incorporates many hardware-autorecognition programs
not automatically included by the prior "boot-floppies" installer
program of 2.2 Potato and earlier.  I vaguely recall there being no
additional modules included in Ubuntu's recycling of d-i, though I could
be wrong.

I kept for many years a roster of optional hardware-autorecognition
packages in http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/ , but it's probably a bit
out of date.  My _personal_ general attitude was always that such
programs cause way too many problems and (e.g.) inexplicably hangs
because some option ROM was poked the wrong way, so I thought it A Very
Good Thing for those to not be installed and activated by default.

Now that such things _are_ tending to be installed by default, in the
event of trouble, you have to abort and try again in "expert" mode so
that you can disable them.

> <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]

I'm guessing you slogged through the ancient boot-floppies installer of
yesteryear, possibly getting bogged down in the swamp that is the
dselect program, like a lot of us old-timers.  That's been pretty much
just a bad memory for the last couple of years.


> 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.

Pentium and PPro-optimized kernels are one apt-get command (or, if you
insist, aptitude, synaptic, or what-have-you) away, on Ubuntu.  Less so
for other packages, but you're dreaming if you think significant gains
can be made there.

> [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.

Even before they got rid of boot-floppies, the Debian people already
offered a choice of _either_ the dselect swamp or the "tasksel"
metapackage (package groups) picker, for the latter part of
installation.  "tasksel" was described as the "simple package selection"
choice in the install screens, if memory serves.