Bug#53563: Retracting original bug, adding new ones with lower severity
Using the latest (2.2.3) boot-floppies, I can not recreate the original
bug. Almost certainly I was using 2.2.2, or some defective mix of
products, when I ran into the problem.
So I withdraw the bug report, as far as it concerned the path names being
all screwed up. I do not consider the remaining bugs critical, since I was
able to get a basic installation running.
The reported problems with mv, cp, and mounting vfat still stand, though I
understand some of them have already been cleaned up.
By pushing things along I ran into some more errors, some of which may
reflect bugs in the boot floppy setup or the packages it depends on. This
report is quick and dirty, in hopes it will provide clues for areas that
need work.
1) ae ^N fails (minor bug)
When editing a file with long lines (it was on a vfat volume) with ae, I
found that ^n would only move me to the end of the current screen line.
Hitting it repeatedly did not move me down more lines.
2) Can't access root account
When I got to my first run through dselect I wanted to mount some
additional partitions. I discovered that I got "authentication failures"
when trying to su to root from another console, logged in as the new
regular user I had just created. I think I was unable to login as root
also, but I'm not sure. Later in the install, I could su or login at will.
3) mkdir from busybox doesn't stick
I created some directories and mounted partitions to them shortly after
loading modules (e.g., vfat, ntfs). But later, using the regular shell,
there was no sign of them.
4) ppp setup fails ("feature"?)
I got the error
/usr/sbin/ppds in file /etc/ppp/peers/provider unrecognized option
/dev/modem
I later realized I used a real name, instead of "provider" when prompted.
I ran pppconfig and created a provider entry, and thiings worked. I don't
know if this accounts for the error.
5) apt-get may overwrite its initial file (grave, if true)
Via dselect I tried to edit the entries in apt-get. Though I thought I was
simply adding to the sources it used, I later noticed the sources.list had
only entries which I had made. Since I also used ae on the file, and since
I might have misread the messages about what the configuration was doing,
this might not be an error.
6) Can't write to NTFS (probable known limitation)
I attempted to download to an NTFS partition, and couldn't write to it.
I'm reporting this just in case the ntfs driver is supposed to handle
writes. The reading worked very nicely (except apt-get gave an error about
the MFT when looking for packages on NTFS drives).
I'm currently mucking around with the portion of the archive I downloaded,
apt, and the packages I may have accidentally selected while using dsselect
earlier. I have a bunch of broken packages (code C), according to
deselect, including required ones (!). However, the scenario I'm playing
may be fairly typical: I tried downloading packages I thought I would be
likely to need, and then installed debian. I now want to install some of
those packages.
As it stands, the install process remains intimidating, requiring detailed
knowledge of hardware and of Linux (e.g., what modules do I need to load).
While this is unfortunate, it is not a bug.
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