boot-floppies 3.0.7 report

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

I probably don't have many news to tell, but anyway.  Note that the
installation was doomed to fail anyway because I had a woody CD
without groff-base (i.e. the CD-ROM was generated before the groff
split); but it failed sooner than expected.

When I booted from the floppy, the first thing I saw was:

    This disk uses the Linux kernel 2.2.19.

I wondered why the floopies didn't ship with 2.4, but I fear 2.2.19
has been decided upon.

Later, I got several

    modprobe: Can't open depencides file /lib/modules/2.2.19/modules.dep (No such file or directory)

messages.  Not nice.

Then I generated a root partition.  I think the output of mke2fs
should not be shown.  It's very ugly to have a blue screen, then a
black screen, then a blue screen again.  But I don't know how hard a
wrapper for mke2fs would be, so some output could be shown, but not
all.

Note that I didn't have a Debian CD, but another CD in my drive when I
booted.  When it looked for {rescue,boot}.bin on my CD-ROM, it didn't
tell me that my CD-ROM did not contain Debian, only that those .bin
files were not found.  Is there no way to find out if a CD-ROM is a
Debian CD?  Anyway, when I inserted the right CD (i.e. Debian), it
worked.

Then I was able to choose which modules to install... I thought it
would be nice to see a short description of each module.  I think
there is a tool to show such a short decription.  If not, perhaps the
description could be taken from the configure file of the Linux
kernel.

Then... it told me that "debootstrap exited with an error (return
value 2).  I switched to console 4, and there is said

    /usr/sbin/debootstrap: arithmetic expression: syntax error: "bootstrap: "

I don't think this is caused by my out-dated woody CD-ROM, but I am
not sure.  What is it?