A new and improved Debian installer awaits for Debian 6.0, but is it better than what's gone before? We take a tour of Squeeze's installer beta and find out.
A new Debian release is coming… someday. One of the key components of the Debian 6.0 release, also known as “Squeeze,” is the Debian Installer, which entered beta at the end of October. Debian’s installer has improved, but still needs a bit of work before it can be considered user-friendly.
Long before there was an Ubuntu, or even a Stormix, I was a devout Slackware user and kept hearing wonderful things about Debian. But almost every person I talked to cautioned that the installation was painful. As it turns out, it wasn’t that bad — at least, I didn’t find it any harder to install than Slackware and I was quickly sold on APT.
About 10 years later, Slackware and Debian are still kicking — and with a fairly similar installation experience that reminds me of the 90s.
The Install Experience
The good news is that Debian’s installer is fully GUI. The bad news can be summed up in two words: Needless complexity.
While Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and others have streamlined the install to a handful of questions, Debian takes more than 20 separate steps to put on a machine. What’s scarier? That’s the normal install. The installer also offers an “expert” install. The expert install seems very similar, but offers logging options and the ability to execute a shell during the install procedure. Perhaps it has more to it, but I felt the regular install was “expert” enough that I didn’t stick with the expert procedure to the end.
The installer has separate steps for providing a user’s full name, their username, and then the password. You’re required to pick the closest Debian mirror for packages, and have three confirmation prompts for partitioning. Users are asked their language, location, keymap preferences, and timezone separately. Surely the installer could group some of these steps and do away altogether with others. Is the alternate-keymap contingent so large that they need a separate step during installation?
For the particularly picky and experienced users, the Debian installer is perfect. For friends I’d want to use Linux, it’s a maze of barely decipherable options. As an experienced Linux user, I don’t find the installer difficult — but I do find it tedious. The GUI aspect of the installer is really no advantage, except that it will look a tiny bit less foreign to users who aren’t accustomed to text-based software.
That said, I do like a couple of things about the installer. I like that the installer gives a couple of partitioning layout choices (choose from all-in-one, a separate /home partition, or separate /home, /var, /usr, and /tmp partitions). I still like picking the hostnames of my machines rather than the random names assigned by many installers these days — but it’s likely to be a point of confusion for many users. (Should I have a domain? What’s a hostname? Etc.)
Challenges
There is a reason that the installer isn’t simplicity itself after all these years. Debian does have a few challenges with respect to the installer, compared to other distributions, some are technical and some are cultural.
On the technical side, Debian supports a ridiculous number of platforms. It can’t be easy to create a useful, usable installer that has to work equally well with “commodity” x86/amd64 hardware and crusty old MIPS machines. Even more difficult, Debian even supports a BSD kernel now — so the challenges abound in terms of creating suitable installer for all the platforms and kernels supported by Debian. (I don’t see a Hurd offering around, so I’m not sure if that port works with the installer or not.)
The cultural challenges are that, simply, most Debian contributors seem unbothered by the gulf between Debian’s level of usability and the technical skills of the average user. If you mention that installing Debian could be simpler, many Debian folks will respond with “but you only have to install it once” in reference to the famed dist-upgrade feature. What that ignores is that many users fail to get (or lose interest in getting) to that point.
Culturally, there’s some hope for change. The recent resolution that allows non-developers to become members (“Debian Developers”) with voting privileges might mean more user-centric folks will be attracted to the project. They might push for a more user-friendly installer.
The Final Verdict
The Debian Project produces a wonderful Linux distribution, sort of like a good buffet with really bad layout on the outskirts of town. The quality and selection are fantastic, but getting to them can be a chore, and you’re pretty much on your own to find what’s available and how to get it. Also the restaurant staff keep pushing the liver and onions, hide the desserts, and keep asking if you want regular cutlery or chopsticks to eat your steak with.
The installer will work well for experienced Debian users, infuriate users that are used to simpler installers, and totally befuddle most newbies. I’ve tested it on a few systems and it works well enough, but I’m disappointed that the Squeeze installer has not increased the usability of Debian in any significant way. Maybe with Debian 7.0? In the meantime, there’s always Linux Mint’s Debian Edition.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at
jzb@zonker.net and follow him on
Twitter.
Comments on "Will Debian 6 be Easier to Install?"
I have to ask what the point of this article is. Yes, Debian is not as easy to install as Ubuntu, or Mepis, or Mint or whatever. If easy installation is a requirement for you, then use one of those distros. If installing on a variety of platforms with fine-grain control is important, then use Debian.
I find the presentation of diversity in purely competitive terms tedious. Debian loses the installer game! Debian wins the update game! Every distro doesn’t need, nor should they have to try, to be best at everything. That’s the point. It’s unfortunate that so many pundits stick with this tried-and-true storyline, rather than trying to present truly insightful commentary on the tech world.
Point to this article? None. The installer is pretty easy to use. Tedious? You’ve got to be kidding me. All you have to do is read. That’s the problem with so many users today. They are so used to getting everything “now”, they don’t want to read anything.
Quote: “but getting to them can be a chore, and you’re pretty much on your own to find what’s available and how to get it.”
Squeeze has the exact same software center as ubuntu, just in the administration menu. It’s not hard to find applications at all, or maybe you didn’t bother to look.
People say it is complicated to install Debian because of installer and lot of choices user is given during installation process. I would rather say that installing OS without any choice is much more difficult. Sometimes I need to do installation in my way not in a way dictated by distro vendor. Debian gives me that opportunity and tools that I need.
“Dumb” users do not have to install Debian, they can ask some one else to do that for them or they can use Ubuntu or other friendly Linux distor.
Hello, this is my first comment in Linux-mag. The last week I began a course of Linux in my work for twenty students. The first class was process to install Debian 5.0 in text mode, when the class finished I ask to student how was a process for you? Many students answered me: the process was long but easy, the installer brings many options to user. I use Debian since 2006, the installer is perfect!.
Joe, I do not know if you have compared the current Debian installer to the Etch or Lenny installer – or even to to Potato or Woody installer, but that’s about how long I have been using Debian releases and trying out various Debian installation procedures.
Yes, Debian still lags the most “easy to use” distributions in asking a few too many questions, but I found a significant improvement between Lenny and Squeeze, to the point that the questions and the flow are nowhere near as annoying as they have been in recent releases.
Until Etch, the procedure, at least to me, was terrible. Etch added an easier procedure, but not a very streamlined one. Lenny made it easier, but it still needed more streamlining. I feel that Squeeze did a better job yet. Is there still room for further improvement? I’d say yes, but I think at last they are “getting there”. Perhaps it is still not for a beginner who can’t read or who can’t study to learn terminology, but I feel that it has been significantly improved for three major releases in a row, and on the Debian project, where the installer has always been one of the big weak points, to me that is significant progress.
I had problems with the Lenny installer, that led me to Testing/Squeeze.
I’ll have to add that I never had a problem with Debian’s text based installer. I’ve had far more trouble with graphical based ones. In fact I’ll go as far as to say I hate the graphical installers. I always opt for the alternative installer on Ubuntu it’s faster and sensible. Recently tried Fedora 13 – horrible install process – that ended in something unbootable. I couldn’t get my Fedora to install in text mode. Perhaps I had the wrong type of install disc – groan.
I had an issue with booting off and installing from USB with squeeze – I got around it, but it wasn’t totally intuitive – it should be!
On the subject of installers, I do like the idea of unmanned installation. Being able to answer questions up front then walk away. Some distros, prompts you somewhere in the middle of the install process – and it’s left hanging (Horrible – reminds me of windows.)
You should be able to even do a headless install!
Long live text based installers!
If all you’re looking for in a distribution is that is should be easy to install, then Debian isn’t for you. Debian is about diversity and having a choice to install what parts you want. Not a preconfigured packet served in a fastfood resturant.
somthing good never comes easy.
Seems the naysayers can’t be more than about 16 years old!
Download a copy of Debian v1.0, install it, with a graphical environment, and then report back.
Hmm, let’s try to comment.
As preamble: I am one of the developers of the Debian Installer. As member of the D-I team since 2003, I mostly focused on i18n and localization (have you seen how many languages you can install in?). I have also always been interested in usability (being a not-so-technical person, that’s kind of logical).
So, there are about 20 questions to answer for a default install, Joe. You’re right (or you are probably right…it’s been quite some time since I counted and that, anyway, depends on what you install).
But, have you noticed that you can indeed install Debian by just hitting Enter 20 times (with one exception)? *All* defaults are safe defaults. And the only exception is precisely being safe : you are requested to answer “Yes” when you apply partitioning changes..while the default is “No”.
Usability has always been a target for D-I developers. As I wrote many times already, we mostly target D-I to someone we call “Joe User” (no kidding) : a person somehow intereste din computers, able to understand very basic jargon (what is a partition, what is an operating system, etc.). I still think we’re doing pretty good job in this.
Sure, we ask several things during install; But most of these are quite easy to understand: language, country, keymap, network settings (default being “just do DHCP, dude”) , user password and creation, way to partition, timezone (only if you live in a country with multiple timezones), what to install…and bootloader stuff.
Really, for something as versatile as D-I is, I don’t think we can do much better.
You suggested to group things together. However, this is not as easy and trivial as it seems. Let’s take the language/country/keymap trilogy as an example. If I choose “French”, I’d prefer being prompted about French-speaking countries…and not a huge list of 250 countries…but, I’d still like to be able to choose Antarctica is I happen to live with penguins (or to be one: some penguins do speak French). Then, if I stupidly choose “France” as country, I’d prefer seeing the (weird) keymaps we, stupid french dudes, are using. Etc.
All this can be done sequentially, indeed. This is why you get several questions, one after each other.
We did our best to *group* these questions together, as much as possible. However, given the fine-grained nature of the installer (it is also designed to run in low-memory environments), there are trade-offs in this.
More generally speaking, I think we’re doing quite well….for a team of less than 5 people who are doing all this thing on their spare time. Well enough indeed, for Ubuntu to use Debian Installer as their “alternate” installer (the one for people who really want to control how they install their machine).
And, in case you’re still not convinced about this, please try to once see our “Babelbox” : a neat demo of Debian Installer that just runs Debian installs over and over in nearly 70 different languages. That one is a killer demo for booths at exhibitions. More details on http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/BabelBox
Thanks to everybody who commented, by the way. Your encouragements, folks, are our best motivation to continue. And thanks, Joe, for this great feedback, anyway!
Hey, am I the only one who tried to install Debian and couldn’t? Back about two years ago or so, I thought I would try. The install croaked!
I’ll believe it when I can do it. For now, Ubuntu 10.04 works.
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