Tom wrote:

How's the Debian installer, assuming I go with the original instead of a derivative (i.e. Knoppix)?

Just to make sure I'm being clear about this: Running Knoppix's optional /usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall installation does result in a Debian system, as one would understand that term in all meaningful senses. So would running the Progeny Graphical Installer ISO image, either the downloadable or the retail-box version of Libranet, the retail-box Xandros Desktop OS installer, the plain-vanilla Official Debian installer, or various others.

The plain-vanilla Official Debian installer is designed to be fairly modular, to support installation from the widest possible range of installation sources (local CD, hard disk, NFS, http, ftp, Zip disk, etc.) and to work across all 11 supported CPU architectures. In order to support installation onto the widest possible range of target hardware, it eschews aggressive autoprobing of hardware: Instead, at a point early in the installer, you can pick appropriate drivers from lists of such things by category, at which point the installer attempts an insmod. If the insmod succeeds, then you must have guessed right (*grin*) and the device (/filesystem/etc.) immediately becomes visible to the installer. Also, it gets added to the /etc/modules that will be written to the target hard drive.

Later on in the installer, you are given a choice of either simple or advanced package selection. You're advised to go for the former, which gives you a choice of metapackages (package groups). The "advanced" branch takes you into the modestly infamous dselect program, which many of us have never warmed to and consider a human-engineering debacle.

In either case, the installer then takes a fairly significant amount of time retrieving needed packages, and then installing them, and then configuring them (in that order). The command-line processes invoked in background to carry out those steps (apt-get, dpkg -i, and dpkg --configure) are fairly verbose, so there's a lot of scrolling screen output. The "configure" step asks the admin questions for some of the packages (typically maybe around 1/4 of them), on the basis of which it constructs their configuration files. A typical example would be the questions for Exim, the default SMTP server, for which they ask you which of four general types of mail service you need (local-only delivery, full Internet host, handing off to smarthost, etc.), and a couple of other basic questions.

The imposition of a "configure" step is in contrast to installers such as RH's (or knx-hdinstall), which do bulk-copy of generic configurations to the target drive, rather than consulting the admin to build system-tailored ones. In exchange for spending a bit more time answering questions, you get a system that better fits what you need to do without post-installation work.

Other than those two points, I can't see a lot of difference between the plain-vanilla Debian installer and other ncurses-oriented console installers for other *ixes. People gripe about it, so maybe some of those who have particular problems with it will speak up.

Oh, a few other things: (1) If you start your installation using floppy disk images, you have your choice of several diverse floppy sets, some of which deliberately omit some categories of hardware drivers so that you can successfully install onto machines with problem components in those categories. (2) When installing from CD, provided that your BIOS supports Joliet alternate boot images (most do), you can pick alternate boot "flavours" including "bf2.4" (boot flavour 2.4), which causes installation using a 2.4.x kernel. Otherwise, installation uses a 2.2.x kernel. Regardless, you should "apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.*" after installation, where * is some suitable version number, CPU type, etc. Fire up aptitude or synaptic to see what precompiled images are available on the package mirror sites.

I originally selected Knoppix because:
[...]
- I can give out the CD to my students and they can have the same environment at home as they do in class.

Knoppix has distinctive eye-candy, but it's nonetheless fundamentally Debian. You could install Debian to the workstations using the plain-vanilla installer and give the students Knoppix disks, and they'll basically have the same thing in both places. That make sense?

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com