Hello,

first of all let me apologize for the wrong usage of the BTS by me, especially 
at you, Geert and Frans.
Thank you very much for providing links where I learned about the correct 
usage, so I think this misuse won't happen again after this bug has been 
closed. Wasting developer's time is really the last thing I want to do.

> > - With a German setup there are no umlauts in the output of console 4.
> > Instead of the umlaut built by "ae" (an "a"
> > with 2 dots above) the computer prints an upper case "A" folled by a
> > character which looks like a filled square.
> > After the installation (reboot) the umlauts worked in the console.
>
> Known issue, but as most of what's logged is in English, it's not
> something that has high priority for us. You can always view
> /var/log/syslog in an editor (the installer has nano) to work around this.
>
Ok, thanks for that hint.

> > - I installed the desktop task on a 2.4 GB partition, which was too
> > small so the installation stopped after
> > downloading all packages and installing most of them. This is quite
> > frustrating if you have a slow internet
> > connection. It should be possible to estimate the necessary partition
> > size after choosing tasks and abort or at least
> > print a warning message if the available space is too small.
>
> Unfortunately we cannot get the information we need for that. The
> installation guide has the minimal size requirements (although these have
> not yet been updated for Etch).
I had some ideas how it could work and wrote a little script appended as 
tasksize.sh.
Wouldn't something like that work? Or did I miss something?

The idea is to determine the task size during installation and put the size in 
brackets after the task name. Printing a warning if the available space is 
too small would be the next logical step.

(if I should change or improve the script, please just tell me)

>
> > - Having a not big enough partition and unused diskspace directly in
> > front of the partition I switched to another
> > console and startet "parted" after the installation has aborted. But
> > "parted" wasn't able to resize the ext3
> > partition created by the debian installer some minutes ago. Error
> > Message: "Error: File System has an incompatible
> > feature enabled".
>
> If you can identify which "feature" was blocking the resize, the parted
> maintainers will probably be happy to look into this. Please file a
> separate bug report against parted.
Ok, I'll further investigate on this and then file the bug, thanks.
>
> > It would be quite handy if the parted version in the debian installer
> > could handle the partition created by the
> > debian installer, wouldn't it?
> > So I had to go back to partitioning and choose a larger partition.
> > There was no reboot necessary, which is great!
>
> The installer itself is also capable of resizing partitions, but as it
> uses libparted as well, that could run into the same issue.
I'll test this.
>
> > - I didn't choose a swap partition as I have 768 MB RAM. But debian
> > installer printed a warning like: "You could get
> > problems during installation if you don't have enough memory". This
> > sounds like the debian installer would have no
> > idea how much memory in my system is installed, which is definetely not
> > the case and I'm quite sure you know how
> > much memory D-I needs, so please only print this warning message if the
> > user doesn't create a swap partition AND has
> > not enough memory, as a normal user could get confused by this message.
>
> I guess we could check for "obviously enough memory". But no, we do not
> know exactly how much memory the installer uses as that depends on the
> architecture, installation method used and optional features used.
> For example, the graphical installer uses significantly more memory than
> the regular installer. And an installation using LVM or crypto also uses
> more memory than an install that does not.
> It is also dangerous to hardcode values like that as at some point you may
> run over them. IMO the warning is worded neutrally enough so it is not
> alarmist and as you are free to ignore it, I don't think we should change
> it. swap-less installations are very uncommon, so having a check for it
> and asking the user to confirm he does not want swap IMO makes sense.
Ok, your arguments make sense.

> > - grub did not detect my Debian Sarge installation on /dev/hdc1
> > (reiserfs).
>
> That is not grub, but os-prober.
> Could you check if the /var/log/installer/syslog contains any indication
> why this failed?
> Would you be willing to debug this for us?
Sure. 

Drive is found correctly:
hdc: SAMSUNG SV1204H, ATA DISK drive

Partition detection works equally well:
90linux-distro: result: /dev/discs/disc2/part1:Debian GNU/Linux 
(3.1):Debian:linux
os-prober: debug: os detected by /usr/lib/os-probes/mounted/90linux-distro

Then grubs seems to work fine, too:
grub-installer: Could not find /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
grub-installer: Generating /boot/grub/menu.lst
grub-installer: Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ...
grub-installer: done

But then I had to insert the entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst by hand anyway. I 
don't know where to look else. Any ideas?
I could reinstall if that would help and see if I can reproduce this.

>
> > - grub detected my installed Windows 98 (/dev/hda1) and Windows 2000
> > (/dev/hda5) (huh, these were dark times!), but
> > failed to name the Windows 98 partition correctly.
> > To understand my point you first have to know the following: Windows
> > 2000 installed its boot manager in the Windows 98 partition.
> > I know this is not the easiest way, but it's the default, which Woody
> > and Sarge created.
>
> No, Woody and Sarge have never set up a Windows 2000 bootloader in a
> Windows 98 partition. That is something you have must done yourself, and
> it is indeed what confuses the installer. I don't think we can improve
> the detection of this.
> Fixing it is trivial though: just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Sorry, my mistake. Windows 2000 and Windows XP install their bootloader (and 
some boot files) always into /dev/hda. You can't change that to the best of 
my knowledge. Windows doesn't install if /dev/hda is no FAT/NTFS partition.
On /dev/hda I have Win 98 installed and os-prober named it as Windows 2000 in 
grub, which is really just a cosmetic problem.

Should I file that as a separate Bug against os-prober with severity minor?

> > But as I checked: Booting /dev/hda5 out of grub doesn't work.
>
> Must be because you told Windows 2000 to install its bootloader in the
> Windows 98 partition. Again somewhat unusual and not something we can
> easily support.
Please forget about this. Everything is alright, I made a mistake with that.

>
> > All the following observations propably don't affect D-I but I don't
> > know where to report it. So please forward it to
> > the correct package or point me to the desired place.
> >
> > Wouldn't it be a nearly perfect guess if you assume that
> > "A" should have "L" as the default language in
> > Gnome if the desktop task gets installed as well?
>
> This should be fixed in current installations.
Ok, thank you very much, I'll test that.

> The remaining issues are indeed not related to the installer. Please file
> separate bug reports against the respective packages if you want to
> follow up on them.
Ok, thanks again.

> Anyway: Have fun with you Debian GNU/Linux computer system.
Thank you, I sure have. It's really amazing what you are doing for a great 
work!

Cheers
Patrick

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