Testing boot floppies 3.0.19-2001-12-30

[Jeff Sheinberg <jeffsh@erols.com>]

Hi,

I just did an install using drivers and basedebs located on a
local hard disk partition, /dev/hda6 (ext3), to the new root (/)
on /dev/hda9 (also ext3).

There were no problems mounting /dev/hda9 as ext2, even though I
had just created it as ext3.  This is mandatory, since the
supplied 2.2.20 kernel does not support ext3, however, I could not
access the /dev/hda6 partition until I had first converted it back
to ext2 (tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hda6).

I switched to the syslog VC to see what was happening here, and
the problem was that the mount command executed was,

    mount -t ext3 /dev/hda6 /instmnt

which can never succeed without the proper kernel support.
I suggest that boot-floppies should try ext2 after ext3 fails, or
just try only ext2 for kernels that do not support ext3.

I also noticed two minor problems,

    1. On the Debian blurb screen its seems that the end of blurb
       is truncated following the 2nd (page down) screen.

    2. After rebooting, I choose "do not run dselect", then the
       install seemed to hang.  I then typed "Enter", after which
       it became obvious that the apt install step had been
       started, however, its notification message/prompt was
       missing, thus causing the perceived hang.

It seems that a few prior bugs were fixed,

    1. "pppconfig" is now run before "pon".

    2. pcmcia-cs set to "purge" on my system which has no PCMCIA
       devices.

    3. I was able to make a "custom" boot floppy without any
       problems (others had reported this as a problem to the
       debian-testing list).

So, from my vantage point, the only remaining major issue is a
cosmetic one - the shadow boxes around the text widgets are still
screwed up.

Thanks,
-- 
Jeff Sheinberg  <jeffsh@erols.com>