Re: Please test debian-installer rc1 images

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> debian-installer rc1 is going to be announced officially next week.
> However, the images for ARM are already available.  I'm now looking
> for people who are interested in testing these installer images.
> 
> If you have a spare ARM machine or want to reinstall your machine for
> some reason (for example to move from arm to armel), please use the
> installer images from the following location and report problems to
> this list:
> http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-armel/current/images/

In order to switch to armel, I plan to do exactly this. As I'm not
installing from the thecus firmware, do I just grab the initrd.gz and
vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-iop32x from here and then boot them via tftp and
redboot?

My root partition is a RAID 1 mirror so what I was hoping to do was break
the mirror, ensure that I can still boot to the active half of the mirror
via RedBoot and then install to the other disc, creating a mirror that
has one half missing. Has anyone done this successfully and does it make
sense? I have vague memories of the Debian installer not letting me create
raid 1 mirrors with one half missing. With the thecus, I won't have the
option of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a shell. Also, will the installer
do anything that might prevent me booting from my old half-mirror? Also,
when I add both discs back to the new mirror and delete the original
mirror, might I have problems with the md devices being renumbered.

Does the armel kernel (your DMA patched 2.6.26) support the old ABI too,
i.e. will I be able to chroot to my old ARM installation while I'm
migrating my configuration?

Thanks

Oliver