Migrating from Lenny to pre-squeeze installer
Howdy,
I use the Debian installer to install boxes using custom packages from
both a cd-rom and netboot preseeded process. Right now I'm looking at
migrating from Lenny to the current pre-Squeeze debian installer to test
the waters for the upcoming release. Plus we got in some new hardware
that doesn't work with the Lenny Xorg version. *shakes fist at intel*
I've got debian-cd and simple-cdd from svn and patched in #537368 for
boot splash image support in debian-cd and our custom boot menu in
simple-cdd. It mostly works as well as the Lenny.
I just wanted to float a few things out there to see if you guys would
prefer me writing bugs vs. just trying stuff here on the list.
1 - Making a custom initrd dies for me. Running this:
fakeroot make ONLY_KLIBC=1 PRESEED="preseed.cfg" rebuild_cdrom_isolinux
It dies with error 1 when running the get-packages script. I've isolated
it to "if $KERNELVERSION" block around line 150. If I comment that block
out, the initrd builds fine and runs. I can dig in if someone can tell
me what to look for in there.
If I take out the ONLY_KLIBC line I added, the find command run under
$(MKLIBS) near the HACK ALERT: in the Makefile tries to include a bunch
of text files in the library which chokes mklib. It looks like the logic
is off in the find command somehow, because looking for files where the
mode +0111 or *.so or *.so.* seems to be too greedy and matches lots of
non-code files.
2 - The preseed for the netcfg/get_hostname and netcfg/get_domain isn't
being picked up if you pass those in a preseed url. It does get picked
up if I add them to the initrd image in the preseed.cfg file. Was that
intentional?
3 - I've got a persistent preseed failure selecting the keymap. I can
select American English manually, but the console-keymaps-at/keymap
setting for 'en' that used to work now seems to get ignored.
4 - Thanks for putting the netcfg/enable setting in there for me last
year! For some reason, even though it is set and I've preseeded as much
of the wireless values as indicated in the templates file, I still get
an Error about being unable to start the network. I see the code in
netcfg-common.c where the netcfg/error message is thrown in the
netcfg_die() function. It is called from one of three places in the
file, but I haven't narrowed it down yet. I still see the test for
netcfg/enable in the netcfg.c so I don't know why it is still trying to
do networking at all.
5 - I've had some issues getting grub happy with the preseeded values. I
was wondering if anyone has some clues on what it is looking for? I see
the grub-install package was updated to 1.54, but it didn't help this
situation. It will complete the install if I don't preseed any
grub2/grub-pc items, but if I do it either fails looking for the kopt
command line (which is already preseeded in there) or gets into some
kind of weird endless postinst loop if I change the preseed settings.
Thanks for the great work on the installer! It's looking really good on
the new hardware I've got to support. I'll keep plugging away at these
issues and will provide patches as I can.
Tony
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