Installing Debian Using A GUI
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After much hard work, the d-i team announced that the upcoming Debian release, Etch, boasts a new graphical (GTK+) frontend which allows installing Debian in many new, previously unsupported, languages. |
The graphical installer has been widely tested and is available for i386, AMD64 and PowerPC and the regular CD images for i386 and amd64 include an option to boot the graphical installer by booting with installgui.
Also available is a small (~10MB) miniiso image, which allows you to boot the graphical installer by just pressing ENTER at the boot prompt and is very useful for testing/debugging purposes. This image can be found under "other images"; look for netboot/gtk/mini.iso
For the powerpc architecture currently only the gtk-miniiso images are available (and are also available as part of official releases under "Other images"):
For an overview of open issues and things we'd like to see done after Etch is released, see DebianInstaller/GUIToDo.
If you're interested in building yourself a debian-installer with GUI or just want to dive into its internals, please have a look at the DebianInstaller/GUIBuild page.
If you want to build your own udebs, have a look at BuildingUDebs.
Reviews
Here is a list of articles/review about the graphical installer which appeared around the web:
Partitioning tool
As part of a university (?) graduation project, Xavier Oswald has started work on a partitioning tool (based on gparted) that could replace partman in the graphical installer. This work is currently unfinished. Last known status is given in this mail.
Desktop
For common work, see DebianDesktop .
Trivia
It used to be a common misconception that the graphical installer is X11 based: it is based on DirectFB and GTK+.
Update: That's true until Lenny (included), but a switch to X11 has been performed during February/March 2010; later daily builds and upcoming releases should be X11-based accordingly.
FAQ
- How to retrieve the screenshot
Read ScreenShots' Debian-installer section.
Debugging
If there's anything wrong with X, feel free to contact the XStrikeForce.
If X doesn't react at start-up: input might be broken. To debug this under Qemu, move to the control window: ctrl-alt-2. Then type that there: sendkey alt-sysrq-r[enter] then sendkey ctrl-alt-f2[enter], then back to the main window: ctrl-alt-1. Grepping for input and/or evdev in /var/log/Xorg.0.log should give some hits. If nothing shows up, try udevadm info --export-db|grep ID_INPUT. If that doesn't work either, input_id might be broken (#580129). To check this, head /lib/udev/input_id or look at the contents of a downloaded/unpacked udev-gtk-udeb package, e.g. using objdump, nm, etc.