Installing Debian Using A GUI

After much hard work, the d-i team [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/11/msg01289.html announced] that the upcoming Debian release, Etch, will 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 [http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ daily built 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 named gtk-miniiso, which allows you to boot the graphical installer by just pressing ENTER at the boot prompt and is very useful for testing/debugging purposes.

For the powerpc architecture currently only the gtk-miniiso images are available:

For an overview of open issues and things we'd like to see done post Etch, see ["DebianInstaller/GUIToDo"].

If you're interested in building yourself a debian-installer with GUI or just want to dive into its nternals, 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 [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2006/06/msg01358.html mail].

Trivia

It is a common misconception that the graphical installer is X11 based: it is based on [http://www.directfb.org/wiki/index.php/Projects:GTK_on_DirectFB DirectFB and GTK+].