Linux.com: A First Look at Debian’s GUI Installer

“Debian’s standard text-based installer has been vilified in the
past, so I was excited to see an announcement about a graphical
installer under development for Debian. A good GUI installer could
bring Debian to a lot of users who don’t feel comfortable taking
the plunge with a text installer. It’s pretty early in the testing
cycle for Debian’s next version, dubbed Etch, so it’s likely that
there will be a number of changes before the new installer is
finalized, but I took the current version for a test run and found
that it’s already fairly usable.

“The Debian project has a lot to do when it comes to writing an
installer. Some have suggested that Debian should adopt the
Anaconda installer, but Debian developers have said this isn’t
feasible for a number of reasons, including the number of
architectures supported by Debian, and the fact that Anaconda
requires about 64MB or more of RAM to run. The stated requirements
for Fedora Core 4 indicate that 192MB of RAM is the minimum for
graphical installation. Since Debian targets machines with 32MB and
up, Anaconda is a bit too chunky for those systems…”

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