On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 10:54:45AM +0000, Dave Restall - System Administrator wrote: > > > I tried to perform an installation of woody using > > boot-floppies-3.0.18 . I wanted to install via the network. > > However the following error prevented me from installing > > woody: > > I had this error too :-( > > > When attempting to install the base system, the following > > error message occured: ``Malformed Release file'', prefixed > > by the ftp site I was pointing to. Anyway, the error message > > appeared time and again. It appeared immediately after I pressed > > Enter at the previous screen, i.e., it did not actually attempt > > to bring the Release file. Moreover, when I (deliberately) disconnected > > the network cable, exactly the same message appeared. > > I saw this too - it doesn't try to connect AFTER the first attempt. If > you get it wrong first it never tries again. > > > I saw in a mailing list (don't remember which, sorry), that > > if one had network definitions problem, then there is no way out > > of this bug, but to re-install from the very beginning, including > > I didn't do this :-) > > I deleted a file (I can't remember the full path) but it was named > something like "malformed_release" and it was in the in the var/lib dpkg > path. I didn't make a note because at the time I was annoyed at the > struggle and the path did seem sort of logical. After deleting this > file, I simply did the usual download, entered the default path i.e. us > server though I would have preferred to use the UK server, and the > install went on from there.
I tried and erased that file, but things did not change after I erased it. I tried it a couple of times, even with a reboot in between. I got the same error message. > > When you do get it installed, it may not work then too. I got through the > install, I used dselect rather than tasksel and by default it installs > ssh and leaves telnet out. It also installs GPM. I just accepted > gpm's default configuration. GPM locked my machine solid, I couldn;t > ssh in because ssh installs broken - it asks for a password and it won't > accept the passwords for root or any other user and I couldn't telnet in. > The machine was still alive though because I could ping it. ALl I could > do was reboot the machine. At this point I didn't know it was GPM. > I rebooted single user and waited for fsck to finish (takes a long time > on a machine with 5 * 18GB SCSI drives). I then installed telnetd. > This doesn't work as installed. You need to add -L /bin/login to the > command line there's something broken with the telnet login program. > Once I could telnet in, I rebooted the machine again and it locked > the console solid. I then telnetted in :-), su'd to root and had a > look around. As I have seen problems with GPM before, I killed that > first and the console came back. As the install hadn't completed, > I was then presented with the "do you want to run tasksel", "dselect" > options again so I followed them through which basically allowed me to > configure exim (soon to be removed because I always compile my own) > and finish the install. I edited /etc/init.d/gpm and made the first > line an exit, I'm not using gpm yet so I'll sort that one out later. > > Regards, > > > Dave > mail/debian/testing/2002-01-03.tx [EMAIL PROTECTED] > debian-testing > +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ > | Dave Restall, IIRC Limited, PO Box 46, Skelton, Cleveland, TS12 2GT. | > | Tel. +44 (0) 1287 653003 Mob. +44 (0) 7973 831245 Fax. +44 (0) 1287 652546 | > | email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : > http://www.iirc.net | > +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ > | signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */ | > | -- Larry Wall in doarg.c from the perl source code | > +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- Ariel. --- Ariel Tankus School of Computer Science Tel-Aviv University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
