Some experiences with 2.2.10/alpha
hi,
i installed an alpha pc164sx today (not that exciting
hardware...) and some notes i took while installing debian ...
i havn't followed the list that closely, so maybe there are some
th ings mentioned that already were said ...
* If I insert the wrong disk, say empty disk instead of rescue
disk, then it takes quite long till this is detected and a
proper error message is printed onto the screen
* while trying getting the base.tgz file I tried the
network/http method which is a nice thing but it fails for
me: when i supply a hostname i get the errormessage:
nf_http_fetchfile :: www.debian.org:80 couldn't be resolved,
Host name lookup failure (errno=2)
but actually, if i supply the ip address it works perfectly
find AND i can resolv the address if i ping www.debian.org
on the shell on f2, so i don't where the bug is but it's not
an error my the computer i am setting up, ping can resolv the
hostname (or i oversse here something)
* While downlaoding the base.tgz file (the 21 megs one) from a
computer in the lan the download rate is ugly, it just
calculates every time and one just sees how the numbers
cahnge, nothing more or less static like apt or so. i.e. you
can't follow at what rate it is currently d/l.
* Aesthetic improvement: i pick a country from which iwant to pick a
mirror. ok, i go to austria and get 3 mirrors, but they are
more or less not in order. so, wouldn't it be good to present
them in an alphabetical order? (i know, whishlist, therefore
the aestethic at the beginning)
* if i enter wrong data while configuring the network, i.e.
supplying the wrong netmask, and i then try to get the base
files i wait quite a loooong time till i get an error
message. so, ifconfig is called with wrong params, i.e. wrong
bcast address in this case which i can also see on the log
terminal, and the method for getting the base files tries and
tries to get the files but failes du to a config error and
after a timeout replies me with a senseless errormessage.
so wouldn't it be better if error messages are intercepted
while configuring the hardware that there the install routine
tells me that i did something wrong and i have to redo it?
* btw. what has happend to the overview of options i configured
for networking? i missed this because it had helped me
debugging why i couldn't d/l the base files due to a wrong
bcast address.
maybe debian-boot is not appropriate for this but some notes for
the writes of the nearly perfect introductions to isntalling
alpha. my suggestions come from a newbie's point of view,
experienced people wouldn't bother this.
what i missed in the install docs for installing debian on an
alpha is the description of BSD disklabels. what is it for,
what's the theory and such things that one can imagine what
he/she has to configure. i couldn't have partitioned the harddisk
without knowing bsd disklabels from *BSD ... also a little
example would be nice in the docs how this should look like at
the end.
furthermore i am/was quite confused about the aboot stuff what
the story behind this was. should i leave some megs for it or
not? should they be within an partiton or should the first
partition start right after the non-partitioned space for aboot
... some one else answered me the question but well i couln't
have figured this out on my own.
and there is also a bug in the pdf versions of th einstall guide.
in point 5.2 is a listing of the various subarchs and the i
mages which should be in there, so, alpha has many subarchs and
the list is pretty long but the long list doesn't get break up at
the end of the text, i.e. is just one long line.
another thing which puzzled me was that under the subarch dir
resc14440.bin etc. should be (if i read the docs) but actually,
the most i can find is just milo.bin, so what's the magic behind
this?
hmm, that's all for now ...
so long
Othmar
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