Package: installation-reports Debian-installer-version: jan 03 businesscard iso, plus jan 02 hd-media image Method: Arrived at tri cities regional airport with a blank usb memory stick, two laptops (one running debian, one blank). Went to observation lounge, and got online. Downloaded above images using installed laptop. Wrote to memory stick. Used this to boot my test laptop, inserted my orinoco card, and downloaded rest of debian over the wireless network. Machine: lc2000 laptop Processor: p4 Memory: 512 mb Root Device: 32 mb ide Root Size/partition table: installed to /dev/hda3, 1 gb partition Base System Installation Checklist: Initial boot worked: [O] Configure network HW: [E] Config network: [O] Detect CD: [O] Load installer modules: [O] Detect hard drives: [O] Partition hard drives: [O] Create file systems: [O] Mount partitions: [O] Install base system: [O] Install boot loader: [O] Reboot: [O] [O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it Comments/Problems: I ran into the problem previously reported with pcmcia not working until it config.opts is modified to not exclude irqs. This was annoying, and I had to get to the main menu and restart netcfg after restarting pcmcia. A normal user would not be able to get past this. There was no iwconfig, but /proc/net/wireless showed link strength. Then netcfg gave me a list of interfaces (I had to guess that eth1 was wireless), and dhcp worked. I saw some previously reported minor problems: - languagechooser arabic entry bad encoding - "Validating %s" It took a long time to download stuff over the wireless, especially the 11 mb kernel. Progress displays could be improved for long downloads. After reboot (and re-configuring pcmcia by hand again, and running dhclient by hand), I reproduced the problem with apt-setup looping back to its menu. Other than that, base-config went mostly ok. However, if you run out of battery power in the middle of base-config, and the laptop doesn't support apm (only acpi), and apm is not installed anyway, rebooting into base-config could be a little better. The most annoying thing was that it deleted everything apt had downloaded before, and commented out the sources.list entries, so I had to set all that up over again, and download 50 mb of packages again. On the other hand this accidental reboot did let me verify that once pcmcia's irq excludes were fixed, it comes up and gets online automatically during boot. I selected X and Desktop and Laptop tasks, and let it download them for 45 minutes. In the middle I realised that it would run out of disk space before all this was unpacked, so I moved the apt cache to a different partition. Now comes debconf questions. I was in medium priority due to some of the above-mentioned problems, so I did not get to see the default, high priority install. What I did see were a number of useless debconf notes about useful things like "my config file in in /etc" and "some settings have changed from previous versions (that you never installed, but I'm too dumb to realize)". Some of these already have bug reports, some rather old. Sigh. Now X config. I picked the medium priority install. It asked a slew of questions, some with bad defaults (do not autodetect mouse type, monitor type, default to no video modes available, etc). It gave me a cryptic list of video drivers, and I could not find one to match the radeon card in this laptop. I picked vesa. Despite all this nastiness, X just came up afterwards. I will file a separate bug report on X with more details. As has been noted, gnome and the gnome task is completly broken in testing. Just like it has been for over 6 months. I remeber mailing the maintainer of the gnome metapackage last spring about these problems with no response and no forward progress. This grows annoying; perhaps we should simply default to kde. So I picked kde from gdm and it worked ok. One annoying thing was that its setup wizard asked me _again_ what country I was in, bringing the grand total of times the installer asked me stuff about that to 6: - language/country chooser - keyboard chooser - mirror choice (in d-i) - time zone selection - mirror choice (in base-config) - kde wizard Sheesh. Another annoying thing is that kde wants to open the sound device on startup, and displays an error that my user cannot access it. The user account created by the install should be set up to have access to the sound card. -- see shy jo
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature