Here's the link to building anaconda-based debian ISO images. [progeny.com] http://platform.progeny.com/anaconda/how-to.html

Finally a quick, easy way to remaster debian to hand out to friends.

Not to excited (Score:4, Informative) by killmuji on Monday December 08

Before getting too enthusiatic about this, please do remember to read the errata [progeny.com] before downloading the iso images. Lots of work still needs to be done, but this is a step in the right direction.

Anaconda won't be Debian's default installer — the next version of Debian will use the new Debian Installer [debian.org], which supports multiple UIs and all the Debian platforms.

Anaconda has been ported to Debian by Progeny, mainly because Progeny supports both Red Hat and Debian and they want to use the same installer for both distros.

Oh, and yes, Anaconda can be run in text mode, but it doesn't currently work [progeny.com] in the Progeny port.

Hopefully this means we have Kickstart too.

Debian has been needing kickstart-like functionality for a while. (No, FAI is not the answer, it works in a somewhat different manner, and its a royal pain to set up to bootstrap unstable systems from a host running stable).

> One of the main 'comments' I get when I recommend Debian GNU/Linux to
> people, is 'Debian is difficult to install'

I think it can be argued that the Debian installer asks many questions that may not be easy to answer for a Linux newbie.

But, as you say, there is hope: I remember someone saying, a few years ago, that a RedHat had formatted their drives without clearly mentioning that it would be destructive (oops!). Today, Mandrake can be installed after just a few minutes worth of clicking "OK". It generally makes the right choices for the user, clearly shows what partitions will be created, and warns if it's about to blank an existing windows partition. If it finds some unsupported hardware, it mentions what it knows about it, so that the user can simply ask their local guru for help.

> I think it can be argued that the Debian installer asks many questions that
> may not be easy to answer for a Linux newbie.

That's true, but the point is that most of those questions are unecessary. Every PCI device on my system has a number, and the Linux kernel comes with a map of device number to driver names.

I'm not a Linux newbie, but see it as a waste of time to answer silly questions about the modules I'd like to load for every bit of hardware in my system when my hardware is designed explicitly to avoid the need to do so.

T