Re: d-i: status and where to go from here
This sounds really great !
I'd be happy to test this d-i. Is the floppy supposed to work with PCMCIA netcards
too ?
Eric.
On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 04:24:35PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> 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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--
Eric VAN BUGGENHAUT
Eric.VanBuggenhaut@AdValvas.be
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