Defend Debian
Hello Pete,
I spent three hours last night trying to help my dad install Debian. Unless
I'm more stupid than I realise, there is a major flaw in the Debian
installation heuristic, so I'm copying this to debian-boot@lists.debian.org
in case it counts as a bug. If not, perhaps you can defend it for me!
The situation: we have a reasonably modern PC with Windoze occupying 16Gb of
a 20Gb disk, called the CWC. There is a much older PC functioning as a
"router" - this one happily runs Slackware and shares the cablemodem
connection using NAT. (It also acts as a print server.) There is a 3rd
Windoze-only PC on the network, called the CFC, but it doesn't feature in
this little story.
So, we decide to install Debian on the CWC. We decide to do a net (HTTP)
install, since the cablemodem is blindingly fast and we've never done one
before. We boot into Windoze, fire up CuteFTP and download the following:
..../current/install.bat
..../current/linux.bin (kernel image)
..../current/dosutils/loadlin.exe
..../current/images-1.44/root.bin (initial ramdisk image)
Off we go. Kernel boots fine, loads the initrd fine. We step through the
install, sorting out swap space (hda5) and creating and mounting a root
partition (hda6). We get to "Install Kernel and Driver Modules" and find no
net option - we try "Configure the Network" but this Debian kernel hasn't
detected the network card (a D-Link DFE-530TX).
So we go back to "Configure Device Driver Modules" thinking, no problem,
we'll pop in the module and be off. The modules are of course not there
because we didn't download them, so we go back into Windoze and fetch
..../current/drivers.tgz
Then we start over (from install.bat) and step through again to the same
place. We use "Mount a Previously Initialized Partition" to mount hda1 on
/target/mnt/hda1, in order to gain access to the modules. Turns out we can't
configure a module (even though we now have the driver tarball visible),
because modules are not "installed"!!! Surely a decent init script could
accept user input to point it towards a module tarball, and look inside said
tarball for the modules?
Anyway, doesn't matter too much because we can now do "Install Kernel and
Driver Modules" from /target/mnt/hda1 instead of looking for a net option.
For some reason we need to download the boot floppy image
..../current/images-1.44/rescue.bin
because the install script can't install the kernel from the linux.bin file.
We do this, and succeed in installing the kernel and modules, but we still
need to configure the network card before we can complete the first part of
the install (the "Install the Base System" step).
The D-Link DFE-530TX uses the Via-Rhine chipset, and therefore the
via-rhine.o driver. Attempting to insmod this driver fails, seeming to
require some parameter or other. This is odd, because via-rhine.c says that
the driver reads card data from the EEPROM, so no arguments should be
necessary. We go back into Windoze AGAIN to get the details just in case
(IRQ 5, i/o base 0x9400, mem base 0xe100), but no amount of jiggery-pokery
gets the sodding via-rhine driver to work.
I don't know enough about the differences between 2.2 and 2.4 to know
whether the via-rhine driver is somehow flaky in 2.2, but we try downloading
all the 2.4 stuff just in case:
..../current/bf2.4/install.bat
..../current/bf2.4/linux.bin
..../current/bf2.4/drivers.tgz
..../current/bf2.4/images-1.44/root.bin
..../current/bf2.4/images-1.44/rescue.bin (not stupid, me - I suspect we
might need this)
Guess what? The install.bat files says "Hah! Well done wasting your time
downloading this. Due to a bug in loadlin (which we haven't bothered to
fix), you cannot install the 2.4 kernel from hard disk. Try writing out no
fewer than SIX floppies, not forgetting to download rawrite and all four
driver disk images (because we provide no means of using only the disk with
the driver you need) and do a floppy install."
Well, at that point it was 2:30am for me and I gave up. I mean, for goodness
sake, I'm more technically literate than 99% of the population, and I was
tearing my hair out at that point. In these days of always-on net
connections, you should be able to download a handful of stuff (kernel,
initrd, modules) and go. Linux is never going to survive if it isn't easy to
install.
For everybody's information, the network card worked perfectly well under
the previous Linux installation (it was autodetected), so I don't know what
the problem was last night. If anybody would like to provide any hints,
please do. Of course we could just download an ISO image and use that, but
that's not the point - what if we didn't have a CD burner? Six floppies?
Come on.
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