Debian-installer-version: 3 hand-built floppy images with packages I am committing now, plus 2 day-old netinst CD Machine: vmware Method: Simulating a machine that cannot boot from CD, I left the CD drive disconnected at boot, and booted from the rootfloppy, then inserted the root floppy, then the cd_drivers floppy, then enabled the CD drive. Processor: vmware Memory: 95 mb Root Device: 300 mb virtual scsi Root Size/partition table: 300 mb Output of lspci: Base System Installation Checklist: Initial boot worked: [O] Load CD Drivers: [O] Detect CD: [O] Configure network HW: [O] Config network: [O] Load installer modules: [O] Detect hard drives: [O] Partition hard drives: [O] Create file systems: [O] Mount partitions: [O] Install base system: [ ] Install boot loader: [ ] Reboot: [ ] [O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it Comments/Problems: The syslinux help screens booting from the CD give wildly innaccurate memory requirements from boot-floppies, as well as boot-floppy-specific command line options, and do not document eg, DEBCONF_PRIORITY. FWIW, free said I had 91 mb in use (no swap) when I was in the middle of running debootstrap toward the end of this install. Yikes. Everything was slick at high priority through loading the cd drivers and detecting the cd. Since I did not load the net_drivers floppy, it was unable to configure network hardware. The only reason it asks about this at all is because the root floppy includes very common network drivers. Unfortunatly, this breaks out of high priority mode when that step fails. I manually selected 'load modules from cdrom' to continue. (One weird thing -- the cdrom-detect menu entry is the third thing on the menu, above items with a lower priority. It doesn't hurt anything, but it does look weird. I tried fixing some of the dependencies around it and hw-detect, but this did not help.) After loading d-i from cd, it autoselected netcfg and bailed out again since it still didn't know my network HW. Again there's no reason this should be asked for a cd install, probably. This points to a bug in netcfg; it should depend on something provided by ethdetect, so it cannot be selected without detecting network hardware first. (Bug filed.) At this point I manually selected detect hardware, and it found my network card using modules loaded from cd. Then I partitioned the hard drive, and the default menu item jumped back up to netcfg-dhcp. Argh! I went ahead and got a lease, chose a mirror, then download installer components failed (no chance of it succeeding, my physical machine is offline). Since the default every time the menu was displayed was going to be "download installer" every time now, I picked "finish installation and reboot", and let main-menu run the formatter, base-installer, etc, to satisfy its deps. Worked fine for the rest of the install. Maybe this could be improved by making the *load-* udebs all provide something like loaded-installer, and use the change Matt put in to main-menu that should make it skip over alternatives. I'll look into it.. -- see shy jo
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