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Re: [LUG] Ubuntu install taking ages

 

On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 06:26:25PM +0100, Ben Goodger wrote:
> Ubuntu GNU/Linux, as a series of packages, is still fundamentally tied to and
> dependent upon the Debian project, and indeed started off as a number of
> usability-and-brownness-increasing patches for Debian. It is, or at least was
> initially, produced by snapshotting Debian Unstable (sid) and then developing
> the result every six months, major modifications to which were supposed to be
> backported to sid. <imo>However, it has now degraded into an unclassifiable
> mixture of sid (2007-09-12), sid (2007-04-13), sid (pre-2007-04-13), and the
> previous Ubuntu releases.</imo> The apparently random and uncoordinated upload
> of packages from sid to ubuntu, coupled with the <IMO>low quality of</IMO>
> modifications and additions made by Canonical, for the upload of which to
> Debian a team has been established<AFAIK> but its sole uploads so far have been
> the new aptitudey apt-get and update-manager after much delay</AFAIK>, produce
> what we are told is the most popular distribution in the world.

I've seen a number of complaints from Debian Developers that
modifications/bugfixes in Ubuntu never get sent back to Debian, or that
they *do*, but the patches are so huge and unwieldy that it's impossible
to work out what's useful and what's not. For example, several Ubuntu
packages have a different build system to the Debian one, meaning the
Debian maintainer has to dig through piles of cruft to get at the actual
useful (or otherwise) changes.

> Until Dapper Drake (6.06), the "Ubuntu installer" was in fact still the Debian
> installer, which is perfectly sensible for a derived operating system. This
> <imo>is a powerful, efficient and above all intuitive installer that </imo>runs
> <afaik>in a heavily stripped-down livecd</afaik> with very low memory
> requirements, which is one of the reasons specified for retaining it in
> parallel with Ubiquity, which runs in an ordinary livecd of Ubuntu (with all
> the usual RAM-eating, etc etc problems this implies.) From what I can tell from
> debian-devel, Ubiquity's role in the development of the new GUI debian
> installer is primarily as an example of what to avoid doing.

The Debian Installer is very modular (and extensible/customisable as a
result). For example, it's possible to set default actions, like
automatically bringing up the network and starting an SSH server, for
headless installs. The Debian graphical installer is built on the same
framework (basically, it's a GTK+DirectFB frontend instead of the
original ncurses one). The Ubuntu graphical installer doesn't (afaik),
so has to duplicate a lot of that effort (I assume if it was based on
d-i there'd be work on it by Debian as well as Ubuntu, but I could be
wrong); it also requires X11, which means it doesn't have d-i's
advantage of low system requirements (I believe it needs 64MB of memory
by default, and has a low-memory mode which uses no more than 32MB).
It's also only a few megs, not including any packages that also come on
the CD.

The memory requirements of Ubuntu, by the way, are ridiculous. Gnome
appears to expand to use all available memory, though I never had a
problem with it under Debian. Several times I actually gave up on
installing it, as it took hours (in one case I left it overnight without
it managing to partition the disk).

-- 
Benjamin A'Lee <bma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/
"A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a
'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble." -
Mahatma Ghandi

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