Last night I downloaded the latest daily snapshot of the Etch installer
for i386 from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ and chose
the net-install image. Upon booting I pressed F1 for more options and
then one of the others (F3?) for boot options and found that
"installgui" would start the GUI installer.
My impression? Good stuff!
This thing Just Works! I was prompted for the usual information and it
took care of the rest. No fiddling with sound or X. Upon a reboot I
was greated with GDM and was able to log into GNOME (not my preference,
but it worked right out of the box). The update icon on the GNOME
panel is a nice touch.
I've since added KDE, Firehol, Audacious and Midnight Commander (this
will be a minimal use machine in my garage for entertainment while
working on bikes and stuff).
There are always a couple of nits to pick, but this process was free of
all but one, when the installer is downloading the package lists from
the mirror site, no progress or any sort of indicator of activity is
shown. A new user might assume the installer has locked up and give up
if he doesn't look at the network activity light. Other than that, I
don't see how an operating system install could be much simpler.
Good job to all involved! This is a major step forward from the floppy
shuffle I did using net-install back in 1999 (note that I don't install
Debian very often ;-) ).
- Nate >>
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