[lug] SUSE- comments

[Nate Duehr]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 12:38:59PM -0700, Deva Samartha wrote:
> But, as I hear, Debian seems to be superior having more automatism to upgrades.

This is true.  New versions are EASY to upgrade to using apt-get, and
are tested during the "frozen" state of Debian.

Debian's also (finally) working on a new installer.  Very modular, neat
features being added.  No one knows yet if it will be done in time for
Woody's release, but the folks on debian-boot are making a strong run at
it.  No one wants to deal with the boot-floppies package anymore,
really.

They're adding packages called .udeb (micro-deb) that can be downloaded
at install time by a single floppy installer or can be already on a
CD-ROM based install, etc etc.  Looks like a pretty nice design even if
it is a little rough right now.  My understanding from reading the
mailing lists is that the developers have the version checked into CVS
currently working in a chroot environment for further development, so
it's a little ways off yet.  There were also discussions about being
able to pick from various bootloaders and ReiserFS support in your
kernel, and a whole bunch of other things if you're in the "expert"
mode, but also being able to just pick a "standard" installation type
and have it do the thinking for you.  

Should be interesting to see how "smart" it is as it matures.

What I'm really looking forward to is Debian getting a proper
"unattended install" mode like RedHat's Kickstart.  I load machines at
work with KickStart regularly and it can even deal with oddball hardware
that requires binary-only releases of kernel modules (like the Dell PERC
RAID controllers and Compaq ones).  

I'm hoping Debian's can do similar "wonderful" things like that!   :)

(Yes, I know there are various hacks out there to do unattended installs
of Debian, but none of them are "official" or part of the project.
It'll be nice to have it as a standard part of the distribution.)

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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