Those crafty folks at Progeny are at it again! Now they have - among a host of other things - modified the RedHat installer, a.k.a. Anaconda, to install Debian. Good news for those intimidated by the good old Debian "bootfloppies" system we all know (and love?). I like the existing bootfloppies system which is reliable and works well on all platforms but for I think this could help rid Debian of the "elitist" tag some attribute the distribution and its users with. Plus newcomers that expect antialiasing during the installation process shouldn't be put off anymore.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel.../msg01880.html

(link stolen without regret from DebianPlanet )

Håkan

i hope the Anaconda code is portable, so that the Sparc, Alpha, ARM (and so on...) users can benefit from it....

the Debian comunity will not include the Anaconda installer in the distro if is not portable, or it will end up only in sid 'cause one of the conditions of one package to enter testing and later stable is to be available on all plaforms.

And as an add-up, I don't see too many of sid's cd's so I guess the installer would die?!

I know Anaconda conflicts with (or complements, depending who you ask) the debian-installer project, which I believe is the preferred installed for the stable Sarge release (correct me if I'm wrong), and I can't see Anaconda running on the S/390 anytime soon so you might be right. On the other hand Progeny look like they are going to release their "own" release again - telltale signs are everywhere, why focus on installers and ease of setup when the stuff they're doing aren't even mainstream Debian and will never hit stable? So if this new Progeny release would hit the mirrors any time soon I think it could be a huge boost for the Debian project as a whole.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the Debian way of compatibility first, but with the amount of users running on the PC and PPC platforms compared to the number of, say, S/390 users, denying some applications entry to Stable because they don't run on some or even only one of the supported ports is just silly. And I'm curious, do you know how the "must be available on all platforms" requirement is worded exactly? There are many apps that are hardware-specific, are those apps considered OK on some because-we-really-need-it basis? I'm thinking of stuff like tpctl, the Thinkpad setup program, which obviously wouldn't be of any use on any platform but i386.

Håkan

* LSD raises an eyebrow

Does that mean you can build and install your own installation kernels getting around the pathetic hardware support of the stock Debian installation kernels?

that would be nice