Hey guys As a follow up to Tollef Fog Heen's debian-installer status -- 2002-10-14 I decided to try out the new install system and send some feedback. There is probably some sorting to do, some things are really minor details and my own opinions on stuff. Some other reflect more general issues.
First I can't say that I've been successful, as I wasn't able to complete a full installation process and had to switch back to regular netinst burned on a CD-RW [0] [1] (bootbf2.4.iso). Anyway, grabbed the floppy img net-1440.img [3], and booted up. A single floppy, so easy to get started (instead of the usual 4-5 floppies CD set). Auto-detect and config of my network hardware (3c59x) went smoothly. Then the first step that caused trouble was '1 - Finish setting up the debian-installer'. This steps asks for hostname of the debian-installer repository, used people.debian.org/~tfheen/d-i, then the path, instead of default debian/ I used /. (I guess I could just have entered people.debian.org and /~tfheen/d-i/ instead) Anyway the main problem is that once the params are entered, in case they are wrong there is no way to enter them again. Use Alt-F1 or use Step 5 - Open a shell to issue the reboot command, do network conf again, then run through step 1 and try better params. You get spammed by messages like: kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s - net-pf-1, errno = 2 that's noisy but harmless. see [4] Once Step 1 is complete, Step 2 - Partition the hard drive is not working atm. You won't see your HD devices until devfs has done his probing job. Run step 7 first. I got a bunch of unresolved messages from the pcmcia modules, harmless. Need to setup partitioning manually. Open a shell, find the drives you want to partition in /dev (with devfs, it can be something like /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc). At this point you realize that some basic command history and tab completion in ash would be awesome. Run fdisk, then mkfs.ext2 (or mkfs.ext mke2fs). mkswap is not available to create a swap partition, would have to mkswap and swapon later when the base system is running. Next is to install the base system. I don't remember the names of the steps, but you have choice between 3, Mounting target partitions, installing base system, and installing lilo. Those didn't seem to work quite well. I went directly to 'installing base system', it spawned fdisk (exited without doing anything) then prompted for partition to mount as / (I use a single / partition, no /var /boot /home partitioning). Installation of the base system asks wether to install Woody, Sarge or Sid. If you try sid, the download will fail at some point with an error about libpcap. Just use Sarge. Once base is installed, LILO setup. The direct step in the text UI can be used, or directly issuing the command chroot /target liloconfig in the shell. The strange thing is that I didn't end up with the same /target/etc/lilo.conf wether I used one solution or the other. If rebooting now, none of the two LILO setup solutions would work. Kernel panics with VFS: Unable to mount root filesystem. Tollef said to add an initrd=/initrd.img to the lilo.conf. You can do this by echo initrd=/initrd.img >> lilo.conf (in /target/etc) or use nano to edit the file. nano didn't start because of missing libslang.so.1. did export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/target/lib and it worked. then, chroot /target lilo to update with the modified lilo.conf Last step is to reboot and start on the base install. This is were I got stuck. No more VFS panic though, but mounting root complaining that it doesn't understand some options of the filesystem. Then I have a kernel line 'Checking root filesystem'. fsck complains about filesystem having 'unsupported features'. I end up with the root filesystem mounted as readonly, asking me to run fsck manually and reboot. Tollef told me that this is the sign of a badly unmounted partition. But I tried a lot of combinations of e2fsck etc., and afaik I got a clean partition. Got the same error in all my attempts. That was about when I ran short of time and dropped the idea of doing a full complete install. Doesn't mean that someone with a bit more skills than me can't do it. Some general thoughts: The new architecture looks good. Probing hardware, devfs usage, loading modules on an as-needed basis. Very small start footprint. All the retriever options (net, cdrom etc.). The install steps are still a bit incomplete. As I used people.debian.org/~tfheen/d-i each time I had to re-get the d-i base stuff, it was painfully slow between each try. FB based UI. Using a good FrameBuffer UI is the next step obviously. The fb stuff that's in [1] is quite good already. Something even better can probably be done. i18n? Not relevant to me in particular, but you'll have to deal with i18n of the installer at some point. cheers TTimo 0. http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ 1. http://people.debian.org/~dwhedon/boot-floppies/ 3. http://people.debian.org/~tfheen/d-i/ 4. http://bugs.debian.org/163748 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
