Re: checking the release-critical bugs
Marc Singer wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 25, 1998 at 06:57:32PM -0800, Joel Baker wrote:
> > Marc Singer wrote:
> > >
> > > This sounds really great. I'm unable to install it on a UDB at the
> > > moment. Since this is likely to be one of the most popular Alpha's
> > > out there it makes sense to get it running on that platform. Right?
> > >
> > > Can anyone confirm asuccessful installation of debian on a UDB?
> >
> > Plus or minus a few things, I've got one running and five more in the queue
> > to be done. The biggest issue I'm having at the moment is working with the
> > kernel. I'm something of a purist, at least as far as core utilities go,
> > and I shudder every time I see anything on stderr when compiling them, so
> > I'm sort of biding my time to see how 2.0.36 ends up.
>
> This is mysterious to me. Lessee. I used Loic's latest boot floppies
> 15-Nov. NFS doesn't work, so I dup'ed an up to the minute mirror of
> sid to a hard drive and installed from there. I installed potatoe
> [sic] since there is nothing is slink and sid is linked there. I
> selected the smallest of the stock configurations, admin, which should
> install about 35MB. The problem is that dpkg, the same version as is
> running on faure, complains when it tries to set the permissions on a
> symlink.
>
> If you can suggest a variation on my methodology, PLEASE. I'm
> eager to get this UDB running so I can use it.
Well, it got sort of hairy in the middle, and I can't *guarantee* this
would work as I spent some time manually installing certain packages by
FTPing and then dpkg'ing them (but that probly wasn't necessary, it just
happened to fall that way due to external issues about hw I could get
the files easiest/fastest).
Boot UDB. Arc console. Wipe it out with factory default reset.
Make rescue and root disks (I *think* I was using the Nov 15 set, but it
might have been the Oct 30/31 set).
Set up NFS on an existing Linux box as
/export/Linux/debian/unstable/main/disks-alpha/
/export/Linux/debian/unstable/main/disks-alpha/base2_1.tgz
/export/Linux/debian/unstable/main/disks-alpha/root1440.bin
/export/Linux/debian/unstable/main/disks-alpha/noname/
/export/Linux/debian/unstable/main/disks-alpha/noname/resc1440.bin
/export/Linux/debian/unstable/main/disks-alpha/noname/drv1440.bin
(Yes, I know some aren't necessary, but I *had* the damned images anyway)
Boot UDB with disks, go through partitioning/swap/fs stages.
Skip down to "Configure Network", set it up like normal. Just to be
sure, ping from the second terminal.
Select "install" option, use NFS entry with a mountpoint of
host:/export/Linux and a directory of "debian". Install driver and
rescue disks, then install the base suite.
Reboot to ensure it comes up OK. This bit jumps straight to MILO, rather
than using the boot setup from ARC or SRM, so it's safe to do. Once it's
back up, install some form of MILO onto the boot partition (formally,
this seems to involve a lot of pain and many packages; informally,
you can get by with a simple "dd if=resc1440.bin of=/dev/sda1 bs=1
count=1440" style flash-to-disk. Enough to sanely reboot, anyway, and
then get the real MILO setup.
(Big hint: if you want to make it easier to install, someone should come
up with a .bin of a sane MILO setup that can be put on with dd and has a
sane FAT table/etc - given that I have *no* computer around here which
can put a DOS native FAT filesystem on, and trying to get mtools to do
it was right next to impossible... well, it'd be handy).
>From there, it was mostly just dselect. My current APT sources.list file
has the following (and don't trust this over someone else's suggestion,
as it was culled haphazardly from the list):
deb http://va.debian.org/debian sid main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian sid main contrib non-free
If you can't install from there... well... honestly, I don't know.
It may require some tweaking by hand to ensure you've got the right
packages/etc. For a good while, the kbd packages on ftp were out of sync
(and are again today, it looks like) and this leads to problems unless
you hold them or force things.
--
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com http://www.lightbearer.com/~lucifer
The proof of the existence of truth is left as an exercise to the reader
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