Re: Centris 650 Debian 10 SID Installation
The mailing list seems to have munged my message, adding extra question
marks. I'm not sure why, maybe because my mail client formatted the
message in HTML instead of plain text (sorry about that).
Anyway, here it is again, hopefully this will be more readable.
And BTW, I'm not complaining about anything or suggesting that anyone
isn't working very hard to provide a working GNU/Linux system forancient
hardware. I'm just trying to figure out why it's not working and
whether I'm doing something wrong. Thanks to all for your efforts.
-----
Hello,
I'm trying to install
"http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2019-05-24/debian-10.0-m68k-NETINST-1.iso";
on a Centris 650 (136 MB, 4 GB root partition, 2 GB swap partition). My
plan was to install and configure
everything on the 650 (including replacing systemd with SysV init since
systemd doesn't do well on slow,
low-memory systems) and then create a filesystem image for my other,
even slower, mac68k systems.
After copying the kernel and initrd from CD to disk and booting with
Penguin, the installation proceeded,
though very slowly; at every re-draw of the screen, I could see each
line being re-drawn. I tried twice
using the stock CD-ROM drive and once using a more modern CD-ROM drive.
In all three cases, installation
of the basic system succeeded after about four hours, then stopped at
the "Configure the package manager"
menu -- "Your installation CD or DVD has been scanned ... Scan another
CD or DVD?". I selected "No" and
hit return: no response, even after several hours. Hitting return
repeatedly or trying to select "Yes"
or "Go Back" also doesn't work, and eventually the arrow keys stop
responding (though F1 and F2 still
work to move the selection left or right). Switching to an alternate
console didn't seem to work (or I
was doing it wrong; I tried several combinations of ctrl-alt-f1,
ctrl-alt-right_arrow, etc.).
After one of the failures, I tried booting into the new system. Booting
using the kernel from the CD
didn't work -- there was a two-minute pause, which ended in a kernel
panic after not finding a root
filesystem (or any SCSI devices). Maybe that kernel only works for
installation using the accompanying
initrd? I next booted into the new system using a 5.x kernel, thinking
that I could use apt-get to
install everything else, but the keyboard map appeared to be wrong, so I
couldn't log in at the VGA console.
I next tried booting using a serial console (console=ttyS0,9600n8).
After the expected slowness of
systemd bringing everything up (about eight minutes), I see a login
prompt on the VGA screen and on
the serial console. The keymap on the VGA screen is wrong, but appears
to be ok on the serial console;
however, attempting to login using root or the regular user account set
up during installation fails
("Login incorrect"). Apparently users and passwords had not been
configured yet when the installation
hung.
Next I booted back into Debian 3.1 (using the same 5.x kernel) to see
whether I could chroot to the
new installation, add a new user and reset root's password. That worked.
Booting back into the new installation, I'm able to log in as root at
the serial console. I don't see
an installer log (I can send that if someone knows where it is or how to
access it from inside the
installer that hung). The network is up, and apt-get works, but it
doesn't find anything, even after
adding these two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/ sid main
deb-src http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/ sid main
Looking in a normal web browser, packages appear to be available in
"http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-m68k/main/";, but apt-get
doesn't appear to see
anything. Maybe there's a simple error in my sources.list?
-Stan
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