Install Linux Faster with the New Fedora 18 Installer

After Windows XP, the average number of `clicks' and/or `keypresses' required to install subsequent versions of Windows has been more or less decreasing. And although these subsequent versions are obviously larger and more complex than XP, the ti me taken for a fresh install of these new versions is less than that for XP, in additi on to the less human interventi on needed. In fact, with Windows 8, many users have complained that the setup is so unnecessarily simplisti c that successive display of on-screen text such as `Getti ng ready' (after a reboot),`Getti ng devices ready`,`Preparing', etc. as progress indicators aft er the initi al installati on phase, leave the user wondering when (and if) the final installation is going to take place successfully.

With Linux, especially with the majority of the distributions which were using Anaconda for installati on, it was a diff erent story. The installer by itself was detailed enough for most users in an unambiguous manner and contained hardly any confusing progress text (although hard to customize for developers), but since the actual installation of the fi les was kept as the last step with hardly any confi gurati on remaining at that stage for an immediate successful reboot into the newly installed

distro, there formed a long chain of steps required to be able to get to that fi nal stage of installati on. This acted as a discouragement for admins wanti ng to switch only a few (and typically, only one) system(s) to Linux. It is worth noti ng that Windows typically gets to the actual copying of fi les in less number of stages than a typical Anaconda-based Linux distro. In fact, even before the enti re installati on is complete, Windows overwrites the boot sector of the hard drive since the OS simply cannot be installed and confi gured leading to a usable desktop in just one reboot, which is not the case with

Anaconda-based Linux distros. In fact, Anaconda used to install the bootloader (if chosen so by the user) only aft er

all the packages have been installed to the newly created fi lesystem, whereas with Windows there would sti ll be

lots of housekeeping and confi gurati on tasks remaining aft er a reboot.

Enter Wubi

Ubuntu, a highly popular distro, came out with Wubi, a Windows-based installer for Ubuntu. This made things a lot easier for those wanti ng to install Linux under dual/multi -boot scenarios. Some of the main advantages being:

(1) No need to burn any disc or use any USB flash drive/SD card.

(2) No need to create a separate parti ti on for Linux.

(3) No strange GRUB/LILO screens on rebooti ng postinstall, since Wubi would preserve the MBR, make the bootloader entry in Windows' bootloader configuration only and chainload from there.

(4) One single screen for entering all installati on options.

But essenti ally it meant that in order to try out Linux in this manner, you would fi rst need to have Windows itself and in case you need to take a look at the files inside the Ubuntu installati on from another OS, it wouldn't be as easy as it would be had the distro been installed on a separate parti tion with a mainstream Linux filesystem.

Enter Fedora 18

The recently released Fedora 18 has, quite literally going by it's version number, come of age with this version at least as far as the installer is concerned. It has introduced a new installer built from scratch, replacing the earlier one whose roots are older than XP. Fedora having done many innovati ve `fi rst's with Linux, it took certain bold decisions in designing it's new installer too this time. Installati on of an OS is a ti me when hardly any productive work can be done on the system(s) under consideration and if that ti me can be reduced, it is indeed a boon for everyone involved.

How the new installer will reduce installation time

1. Long-term tasks can now be performed in the back-ground. You no longer need to wait for an intensive/time-consuming task to complete, which would have otherwise paused the entire installation since the older installer was single-threaded. The UI now remains responsive and usable while those tasks are running in the background. For instance, when you are selecting

the language on the installer's first screen after the welcome, the installer is in the background trying to set up your network connection!

2. The kickstart installation is now more consistent with the GUI-based installer and is backwards compatible so that scripts do not need to be rewritten.

3. You don't need to settle with partitioning hard-disks mid-way in the sequence, only to find out that you needed to have a different partitioning setup (such as a larger root partition) later after package selection (in the older installer, by the time you get to this package selection screen, changes would have been permanently written to the disk's partition table and there

would be no way of undoing that or even returning to the partitioning screen from there).

4. A hub-and-spoke-based design of different screens (modules) of the installer, compared to a linear wizardlike

sequence. It is now actually possible to skip some screens during the installation process, which is feasible

in many cases, e. g. there is only one time zone in India and one predominant keyboard layout, hence these defaults

don't need to be changed. The screenshot shown is of the Anaconda which was run from an installed system

of the GA build of Fedora 18. Note that full-screen space which was often largely empty in many screens

of the older installer has now been better utilized to reach different modules from the same hub.

5. You no longer need to go into nitty-gritties of finegrained package selection and get confused over the

options available, even if you are not using the live images for installation. At the same time, complete

control over package selection is still allowed using kickstart files. And of course there are a wealth of

package management tools, much more feature rich than Anaconda, available post-install.

6. Unless you skip the installation of the bootloader altogether, you won't end up with an unbootable Fedora

installation. The UI does not provide any option to install the bootloader to the / or /boot partition

(there do exist workarounds though), which means that the bootloader if selected to be installed will

always get installed to the MBR and hence you will be able to boot into the new installation for sure.

7. If you choose guided partitioning and try to reclaim necessary free space by deleting partition(s), the

installer will automatically create a partition layout after that.

Writing a kickstart file

Suppose you want the GNOME group with scribus (a FOSS solution for DTP). You also do not want to have

firefox installed. In that case, the following would be the contents of the kickstart file's packages section:

%packages

@gnome

scribus

-firefox

%end

It's that simple. A kickstart file can have many other sections specified in the file so that unattended installations are possible and complete quickly. The installer just needs to load the kickstart file, which isn't too hard.

Conclusion

Since the new installer too is open source, it is only a matter of time before other Linux distributions (especially those which have Fedora as their base distro and most probably Red Hat Enterprise Linux too) make use of and adapt the innovative installer to their own needs once the shortcomings with The `hub' screen of Anaconda in Fedora 18 (shown here is the test build). the new installer are ironed out.