Re: Install Report (b-f 2.3.6 i386; floppy/net; standard)
Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> First problem was getting some disk space claimed back from the Win98
> install on that machine. Defrag and FIPS *SUCK*. Win98 defrag is just
> plain broken (in that it doesn't seem to effectively defragment files,
> nor do much good at moving files away from the end of the partition);
> and FIPS without an effective defragger isn't much good. GNU PartEd,
> otoh, is much more useful; we should at least provide some parted.bin
> disk images, or something. (An image you could either boot or mount on
> /mnt and use would go down well, imo)
I don't think we should supply FIPs or PartEd but rather just link to
parted.
We have other changes we need to make to the tools subdir as well.
The rawrite there doesn't work very well.
Who would get this done?
> dbootstrap occassionally seems to pop up a message about something, then
> immediately skip on to the next thing without giving you any time to read
> it. That's horrible.
That's the "please wait" msg. It's documented. It's not going to
change because if we don't have it it will just hang intermittantly on
slow machine, and that's more horrible.
> Oddly, I got an option to use NFS to get the kernel & drivers, even though
> I hadn't set up my net card at that point. Seemed odd, didn't choose it to
> see if it worked, or died though.
Should work. I think it wants to see the network configured. Needs
testing.
> It's also confusing to have that called "Operating system and modules"
> rather than "Kernel and drivers" --- I always think that means "base
> system", and get confused.
Yah, agreed.
> Also confusing is the "rescue" and "root"
> naming of the disks. "kernel" and "root", or "boot" and "root", or
> "boot-1" and "boot-2" would be more obvious, IMO.
Not a change I'm willing to make at this point.
> When I got to the base install, I got told to use "testing". Fine, thought
> I, so I did. Then I got asked "Am I sure I want to do this?" with "No" as
> the default. That seemed weird.
Yah, I seem to recall changing that already.
> debootstrap definitely needs to give a progress display with bytes downloaded
> or similar.
I think Ethan had a patch for something like that.
> It'd be nice if more of this report was automated for me: having base-config
> notice I'm installing testing/unstable (rather than stable), and fill out
> a template of this report from /proc/cpuinfo, uname -a, dbootstrap_settings,
> and whatever else would be kind of nifty.
There's an option during the dbootstrap phase to compose a bug
report. Not sure how that actually works since we don't have a mail
server yet...
> Rebooting to Windows then tells me that the bastard install has decided
> to fuck up my clock and put it 10 hours ahead, even though I'm pretty
> sure I told it that the hw clock is *NOT* in GMT. Bleh.
"Pretty sure" ? Sounds like it needs confirmation and a bug filed...?
> Anyway. It worked. Relatively painlessly too.
>
> So by the looks of things, woody b-fs *do* support:
>
> i386 net installs
> i386 cd installs (partial)
>
> powerpc net/cd installs (CVS only)
>
> and don't support:
>
> other architectures
I think sparc is ok.
> fully floppy installs
> installation from base tarballs
> pcmcia devices
Hopefully all these will come in pretty soon.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onshore.com.....<URL:http://www.onshored.com/>
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