Feedback on installation attempt
[Please cc: me on any replies you want me to see, I'm not on this list]
Hi all,
I needed to install new machine today, so I thought I'd use the potato
boot-floppies to try them out. These comments relate to the one marked
'current' on my mirror, which contains rescue disks built by joey hess
on 2000-03-08 (it sez here...)
In a word, nice!
A few things I noticed:
I notice it's an fbdev kernel. Is the standard debian one an fbdev
kernel these days? I'm running a stock kernel on my normal machine,
but I don't get the pretty beer-drinking pingu...
I see some weird floppy errors just after the rescue disk finishes
booting, and just before it asks me for the root disk. I don't know
if I perhaps just had a slightly corrupt disk; anyhow it didn't
seem to matter.
The only doc I read was the README in the disks-i386 directory,
possibly I missed some documentation. One thing that might confuse
new users is NFS installs; I know how to do one, since I've been
around for a bit, but in particular: when you select 'Install
Operating System and Modules', one of the choices it gives you is
NFS. However, as far as I can see, you're only going to be able to
install these over NFS if you're lucky enough to have a network
adapter supported by the rescue disk itself. Of course, you can
select 'floppy' here, and then 'nfs' at the next stage, which is what
I did.
Now, the only bug I encountered: the 'configure device modules'
doesn't seem to pass parameters correctly to modprobe. I have a
crappy old NE-2000 compatible in this machine, and I happened to know
that it was set to 0x360. But typing 'io=0x360' in the dialog box
didn't do the trick -- the module failed to install. Hitting 'F2' and
typing 'modprobe ne io=0x360' by hand worked fine, and I was able to
install.
I also made the mistake of hitting 'search for base2_2' which is
*very* slow over a re-exported NFS link ;-), and appears to be
uncancellable.
After I'd remembered not to make that mistake, everything went well,
except, of course, that when I rebooted it hadn't autoloaded ne.o for
me, since I did that 'behind it's back' so when the 'after-reboot'
installer was running [whatever that's called; it's cool anyhow, nice
work asking about MD5 pws in partic] I had to 'alt-F2' again to
modprobe it by hand and then return to the installation.
During the installation itself, the following packages look like
they'd benefit from being debconf-ised (maybe not for 2.2):
exim
[hmm... that's all]. Other things that struck me as it installed:
Being asked about replacing /etc/network/interfaces might be enough to
confuse a newbie into screwing up his newly configured network ;-)
The default X install seems to only install the vga16 server, as far
as I can see. The svga one is much more useful to almost
everyone. The default X install also refers to /dev/mouse, but AFAICS,
this isn't automatically created.
Having finished the installation, I wasn't quite sure of the
'canonical' place to put the 'alias eth0 ne' line. I settled for
/etc/modutils/ne (already created by the install process -- so it
*had* noticed my options choice, just not acted on it properly --
maybe it just forgot to run update-modules?)
I like the task lists. Even for an experienced user, they're a useful
way to install a few big chunks of packages without thinking too
hard. I can always fine-tune later (apt-get install less jed; why
isn't less in a default task ;-)
I appreciate that some of the above are none of your business, but
since you handle 'front-of-house' I'll leave it to you to delegate, or
discard, the complaints ;-)
One last weird thing... the 'xdm' screen has just come up, saying, as
it generally does, Debian GNU/Linux (cinnamon). Except that the N is
in a lighter shade of blue, and drawn twice as high (vertically) with
the bottom chopped of. Weird.
Hope some of that is of some use to someone.
Jules
--
Jules Bean | Any sufficiently advanced
jules@{debian.org,jellybean.co.uk} | technology is indistinguishable
jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | from a perl script
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