d-i: status and where to go from here
Today I built a floppy image, and after fighting with crummy floppy
disks for an hour, got a good one and booted it.
Network card config went fine, dns worked fine.
I told it to continue downloading the rest of the installer, told it
what mirror to use, and my 486 sat there for a good 5 minutes chewing on
the debian archive (with no progress; we really need a progress display
here), downloaded a great deal of stuff that it didn't need to (anna
really needs to be smarter; in particular, downloading the
kernel-image-udeb is a stunningly bad idea..), ate up 2.9 mb of the
ramdisk, and eventually spat out a menu, which I will reproduce here:
Here is the main menu of the Debian installer.
1. File retriever
2. Finish setting up the Debian installer
3. Manually configure network hardware
4. Configure a static network
5. Configure the network via DHCP
6. Configure network hardware
7. Execute a shell
That's 3 more menu entires than it had when it booted, up, so it works!
Hoo-ray!
Well sorta. If you pick "execute a shell", its postinst crashes since it
needs the freopen symbol, which is not in the reduced libc. It's time to
confront the issue of needing a reduced libc to boot, and a larger one
later on, I suppose.
So there are a couple of places to go from here.
* As soon as the abovementioned reduced libc problem is dealt with,
things like partitioning software can actually begin to be run in the
installer, which I hope will be useful to the people who have been working
on that.
* The system needs a great deal of polish. There are little things in
cdebconf like the way it doesn't tell what menu item is default, and
of course a slang or curses frontend would be flashier, but I'm really
talking more about polishing the flow from one bit to another, and the
gestalt. For example, when you boot up right now, you see a main menu
like this:
1. Finish setting up the Debian installer
2. Manually configure network hardware
3. Configure a static network
4. Configure network hardware
That is, well, a little confusing. It would be better to see:
1. Configure network hardware
2. Set up the network
3. Download the rest of the Debian installer
Where picking 1 would give you a choice of manal or automatic hardware
configuration, and picking 2 would give a choice between manual net
config or dhcp. These are the things it's hard to think about and get
right when a bunch of people are working on their own modules here and
there, and much easier to see what's wrong when everything has finally
come together into a complete system.
* We're getting close to the point where I would like to get some
wider testing of:
* the kernel boot sequence (it fails on my toshiba laptop for example)
* network card detection
* downloading the rest of the installer
* the general user interface flow
So I hope to be able to post to -testing in the next couple of weeks
(the idea being to get a little testing from a larger group before
the woody boot floppies need to take priority).
* There are still some major changes looming ahead. It seems we've decided to
pivot_root from a cramfs initrd to a ramfs, and that has the potential to
break everything again for a while.
The image I booted off of can be found at
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/debian-installer/net-1440.img
--
see shy jo
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