Some comments on 2001-05-17 boot-floppies

[David Huggins-Daines <dhd@pobox.com>]

Hi,

I had some spare disk space and time on a machine here and thought I'd
try out the latest round of woody boot-floppies (congratulations to
the boot-floppies team for getting a set out for testing so early, by
the way).  Here are a few things I noticed right away, apologies if
they've already been fixed:

  1) I used the 'idepci' flavour, hoping it would have a good set of
     network drivers in its kernel so I wouldn't have to install from
     floppies.  Unfortunately it lacks a driver for the rtl8139.
     These cards are so incredibly common nowadays that it might be a
     good idea to include this one.

     Of course, a better idea would be allowing the user to load an
     ethernet module of their choice from the drivers disk, but
     knowing dbootstrap, I'm sure that feature would be rather hard to
     implement.  I suppose I might potentially be able to install the
     driver disks, run modconf, and then go back, but that's not
     exactly obvious.

     For this reason, I haven't gone through the entire install yet,
     as I have no desire to install the base system from floppies, and
     I need to reboot into the existing OS in order to download the
     base tarball onto a partition.

  2) The "Select Partition" screen is confused about what partitions
     actually exist on my system.  I have Linux partitions on
     /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda6-/dev/hda10 (in /dev/hda3) and a FreeBSD
     slice (containing, um, five partitions, I think) in /dev/hda2.
     However, the listing on that screen shows Linux partitions in
     /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda10-/dev/hda15.

     This confused me for a while until I chose "View Partition Table"
     and realized that libfdisk had put the BSD partitions *before*
     the extended partitions in the numbering, whereas the kernel had
     put them *after*.  As it turns out, the kernel makes two passes
     over the partition table - the first one only expands genuine
     MS-DOG extended partitions, and the second one expands
     BSD/Solaris/whatever disklabel-in-partition schemes.  Thus it is
     guaranteed that the partitions are numbered as such:

        1 to 4             primary partitions
        5 to N             logical partitions
        (N+1) to infinity  BSD partitions .. and beyond!

     This is actually a pretty serious bug which might cause people to
     nuke their BSD partitions, but it shouldn't be hard to fix.
     Bother me for a patch later if you can't figure it out.

  3) The "Compatibility with 2.0 kernels" question is still being
     asked by default, and the default answer is still "Yes".  Is this
     really a good idea?

  4) It might be nice to do like Red Hat does and label the partitions
     with their mount points when we run mke2fs on them, then use
     mount-by-label in the fstab.  Of course this might break if
     people are dual-booting different Linuces and already have labels
     on their existing partitions, so it would have to be done
     carefully.

More to come, maybe.

-- 
David Huggins-Daines              -                     dhd@pobox.com
                      http://www.pobox.com/~dhd/