Installation report on CDROM-less machine
Hi,
I've just attempted a debian-installer installation on an i386 system
with no CDROM drive, using Etherboot. I admittedly used an outdated
version of Debian installer (the "beta 1" announced about a month ago),
so I apologise if some or all of these problems have already been
noticed and fixed.
The machine had a standard IDE hard drive, NSC Geode CPU, 128MB RAM, and
Realtek 8139 networking.
- Throughout the installer, the line-drawing characters looked a bit
messed up. (using "^" for horizontal lines, ">" for corner bits)
- The keyboard layout selection is confusing. It first asked me for a
keymap for a USB keyboard - but I wasn't using a USB keyboard, and all
of the options it gave me were for the Mac, and for some reason it
defaulted to British English.
It then took me back to the menu. After selecting "Select a Keyboard
Layout" /again/, it asked me whether I was using a PC or USB keyboard,
defaulting to USB; I chose PC. Why was it necessary to ask this, and
why was I prompted to choose a keyboard layout twice? Finally, it
gave me a selection for a PC-style keyboard layouts.
- It didn't succeed in loading all the modules it wanted to; the culprit
appears to be "ide-cd".
- There was no way to specify where it downloaded the debian installer
modules from, or to tell it to use a proxy server.
- It kept wanting to find a CD drive; there wasn't one, so it couldn't.
Selecting "No" when it asked whether you wanted to configure a CD did
nothing. Selecting "Yes" and then "No" when it asked about non-IDE
non-SCSI CDs took me back to the menu. Surely a network installation
should be able to work properly without a CD?
- After choosing to partition the drive, I got the modules error again.
Other than that, partitioning with cfdisk seemed to work. Mounting
filesystems likewise seemed to work. I wasn't told exactly which
partitions were going to be mkfs'ed in the final warning - it would be
nice to have that final confirmation list the partitions it was going
to wipe.
- The keyboard navigation for "Go Back"/"Yes"/"No" choices was a bit
weird - it seemed as though the installer thought that "Go Back" was
on the right hand side, not the left.
Cheers,
Cameron.
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