Problems using latest build
After doing a "cvs up -A" this morning, I was able to successfully build
the latest boot-floppies for the first time in a long while. I must say
that I was highly pleased. Ufortunately, I was not able to do much of
an install with the product. I don't know if folks are real concerned
with bf actually being able to install a system at this point, but here
are the problems I had.
Used a new disk with only an NTFS partition on it. So I jumped over to
tty2 and, happy-happy joy-joy, backspace worked. Now if only I had
command history :) However, when I entered "fdisk" some wierd
unintuitive prompt popped up that I couldn't make much sense of. So I
Ctrl-C'd it and did the deed with cfdisk, good enough.
Things went fine until it was time to install the kernel and drivers.
In the past, dbootstrap would always allow me to just specify the CD and
would "figure out" the rest by successivly pressing enter 3 times. Not
so. I could not get it to extract the kernel and drivers from
resc2880.bin and drivers.tgz off the CD. I jumped over to tty2 and
checked. The CD was in fact mounted, although there was a mount error
written under dbootstraps blue screen of secrecy. BTW, I think
redirecting dbootstraps stdout and stderr to tty3 is an extremely good
idea. Maybe even add a "check tty3" banner that flashes when stderr has
been outputed. Sort of a "check engine" light if you will. Anyway, I
keyed in manual paths for everything but it kept saying it couldn't find
rescue.bin. Well that is strange because there is no file called
rescue.bin in the release at least as far as I have ever noticed.
I gave up at this point and shelled out to "halt" the system. There is
no halt. There's a reboot, but no halt.
Like I said, I don't know how interested folks are with useability
issues at this point, but I think that with only a little over a month
left before the freeze (Jan 1 right?) it may be relevant at this time.
BTW, I reviewed the stderr and stdout from buildtime and did not see any
errors that have not been mentioned in this forum already. Also I used
"make build" instead of "make release." Make build generates the three
files I need and is faster than make release. I am making the assumption
that this is an acceptable practice. Let me know if not. Make check is
successful.
Thanks
--
Craig H. Block, Debian ia32 user (building CVS boot-floppies)
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