Installing Debian

I’d like to briefly share my experiences with enabling support for several ARM boards in Debian over the last years, and use this to highlight some of the issues encountered.

Debian-Installer has had support for various flavors of ARM systems for quite some time, and it’s arguably better now than ever… but it’s still a very rough road. Some of that is just because ARM is, well, difficult, with individual boards requiring specific configuration. But some of it is in the design of debian-installer…

I’d like a broad, open discussion to consider various methods of installing and configuring Debian systems:

• Could we make installing from live images a default option? How could that simplify things, and what would we lose?

• configuration management systems such as puppet, ansible, chef, propellor, etc. are widely used. How can this be integrated into an installer?

• image-based creation tools (e.g. vmdebootstrap) are used to create ARM bootable images for many systems.

• with virtualization and containers increasingly common, how does debian-installer fit in?

• Video