Re: YAIE: Debian on a PowerTower Pro
> Please remember what you're dealing with here. It's written by
> volunteers, maintained by volunteers, polished by volunteers. As it
> happens, the only person working on Power Mac installs was -me-, and I
> only have one. Not to mention a full time course load at the time.
Having pulled off the same task for m68k last year, I think I know what
you are talking about. boot-floppies is a very ugly mess, and you deserve
credit for taking on that messy task. Still, it's true that users first
run into the install procedure, and might be horrified.
> I'll try to limit myself, but my response to more than half of the
> gripes below is "are you volunteering to fix it?". No one else will.
I've given up on those rhetorical questions. Known problem, project needs
more volunteers is my standard reply.
> > Debian installer starts
> >
> > Configure keyboard
> >
> > We have a ``mac-us-ext'', but I was surprised by the very
> > limited number of options. (I believe there were three,
> > only one of which was a non-US keyboard.)
>
> That's because that's all the keymaps that were ever made for the mac
> keyboard layer. That's all redone in late (past few weeks) 2.2 and 2.4
> kernels. We'll have the full set in the next (woody) release.
There should be a mac-us-std and some other language layouts from m68k for
ADB. Should even be in console-data under mac.
> > Once you've chosen a disk, you are unceremoniously dumped
> > into pdisk, without any instructions as to how the program
> > works or what you should do.
>
> That's because pdisk has no documentation :) I intend to replace it
> this coming year.
I wrote a mac-fdisk manpage covering a few pdisk specific quirks. I
believe it's in the recent mac-fdisk package.
> > When you're ready to save the partition map, pdisk says
> >
> > Writing the map destroys what was there before. Is that
> > okay? [n/y]
> >
> > which is horrible from a user-interface--design standpoint.
>
> File bugs on pdisk's package, mac-fdisk.
Please suggest a specific wording for the error message.
> > /dev missing many useful devices
> >
> > /dev is still grossly underpopulated, although it's better than
> > it was when we built my main system a year ago (at that time,
> > there were no /dev/sdc* devices, which was kind of a hassle
> > since my Linux disk was the third disk on the system). We had
> > to run MAKEDEV by hand to create additional devices -- why
> > can't the installation or configuration program do that
> > automatically?
>
> Uh. What are you missing? We create quite a few.
sdc and sdd actually aren't ususally created by MAKEDEV, Nick Holgate
added sdc and sdd to the list of devices to create on top of the standard
set for m68k (weeks ago).
Michael
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