3.0.19 install issues
I just ran through a clean Woody installation on 3.0.19; here's my
observations from it. Hope these are useful. Please CC me on any comments;
I no longer read debian-boot.
The machine was a Sony Vaio R505JL. It has a roughly firewire-driven
expansion bay, but the BIOS successfully masquerades the floppy drive as a
real drive, so I was able to use a normal rescue/root set. The CD (DVD)
drive wasn't seen, unsurprisingly.
I picked the udma100-ext3 flavor; I wanted ext3 for my root FS. I think a
fair number of these problems are related to that.
In particular:
- Mount Previously Initialized Partition failed to mount the FAT32
filesystem. The error was "No such file or directory". Not so useful.
- Choosing "harddisk" as an installation medium fails. Error was "No
such device". No idea.
- Choosing "mounted" defaults to /instmnt but is actually RELATIVE TO
"/instmnt/". This results in a lot of confusion and some ugly doubled
slashes.
- Installing from mounted failed to copy the kernel off the rescue disk.
The loop device was successfully configured (I checked by mounting it on
VT2) but the mount failed again with "No such device". del_loop failed
repeatably, also - negative return code from LOOP_CLEAR_FD.
- bterm glitch: Last line of the screen remained colored. I'll
investigate this in a few days.
- Some error messages are still written to the screen where dialog is
running. I don't know which, since they flash by pretty quickly. My guess
is right after the installation failed to read kernel off of rescue.bin,
above.
- Network install, conveniently, did not have most of these problems.
- Perl gave me a lot of locale warnings. These are because LANG is set
to "English (QWERTY/US)". Someone's picked a bad name for a variable, I
think.
Minor nits: Tasksel still wraps top to bottom in its scroll list, which I
find massively unintuitive. Debootstrap alphabetizes downloaded packages by
package name rather than by source package / URL; that's just personal
preference for organization.
Any of these I should file particular bug reports on?
--
Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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