Last week I took delivery of a new Dell Dimension 4600 for work. Quite a nice machine, 3gig, 2gig, 120gig with a nice 17" flatscreen TFT :)
After powering it up, I started reinstalling the software on it to turn it into a dual boot development box. To install Linux I tried out the new Debian GNU/Linux Installer (beta3) and it worked out quite well. There 2 CD images, one including the base system (100mb), and one without (30mb). I downloaded the 100mb image, burn't it to CD on my notebook and booted it on the new system.
The installation menus are similar to the current 'woody' installer but a few things are different, notably the ability to configure LVM during partitioning, grub as the default bootloader, a 2.4 kernel by default (woody used to boot a 2.2 kernel by default), and (at least on this machine) quite good hardware recognition.
After partitioning and installing the base system, it rebooted the machine and went into package selection. For me, I usually apt-get the packages I want over the network when I need them, so I skipped this stage and was able to log in and start using the freshly installed system.
Was certainly much easier than last year when I installed Debian on other Dimension 4600 machines we'd ordered. I ended up having to install woody, build a new kernel package (available here), install it, and then update to sid to get everything working properly due to the newer hardware Dell had used and the kernel support in the woody installer.
Kudos to the Debian Installer guys, looking forward to seeing this in sid.
Posted by crafterm at April 14, 2004 03:25 PM | TrackBack