Praise + possible bugs
Hi!
Thanks for the big improvements to the debian installer (compared to the
one shipped with 3.0), it greatly reduced the amount of time needed to
install debian on boxes with "nonstandard" hardware (which usually
involves using additional driver floppy disks or temporary installations
on ide drives and then copying over to the "real" drives when having
compiled a kernel which supports the given controller)
I just installed debian from a jigdo-assembled sarge-iso (from 15.12.)
on a tyan opteron barebone and the installation itself went smooth, the
NICs got autodetected by the "net" install (Tigon3 based), the scsi
controller too (LSI Logic Fusion MPT based).
There were a few "rough edges" which might need to be taken care of. I
don't know if these are known issues; I can open bug reports if this is
needed/wanted.
*) Lack of keymap selection: I chose "English/United states" at the first
dialog because I loathe i18n'ed status/error messages. This apparently set
also the keymap to us.
*) No choice to use manual IP setup when using the "net" install. I'm not
completely sure about that, but I think after choosing the interface I
wanted to use for installation it jumped straight to DHCP without
prompting me if I rather want to use a manual configuration.
*) Misleading menu point description: After selecting the mirror where I
wanted to pull the data from there was a point which was called something
like "Scan for data from cdroms" or something like that, I can't really
remember, which apparently scanned the cdroms for kernel modules and
loaded the module for the scsi controller. Naming it "Probe for additional
hardware" might be better (if this is the only thing it does, I don't
really have a clue, please correct me on that one)
*) Partitioning warning when trying to create no boot/have boot being
larger than $magic_limit: It might be superfluous but a general warning
might be good for unwary users which use old pcs/sparcs since they will
very likely have problems when trying to boot a kernel from partitions
which exceed the 1024 cylinder boundary (old pcs and sparcs), or the
various 8GB/32GB/etc. bios limitations on boards with "newer" bios
versions (Pentium/Pentium II era, etc.)
*) "Suboptimal" lilo config: Whereas I like short, not overcommented
configs, the lilo config presented by the installer was a bit _too_ short.
It lacked the (IMHO) obligatory prompt/timeout parameters (to pass
additional flags while booting, etc), had a deprecated "install" line
('install=/boot/boot.b instead of 'install=text' or menu (which would be
better)). Throwing in 'compact' speeds up booting too but might break
things with 'old' computers IIRC.
*) Missing "hostname" prompt: Maybe I overlooked it, but I think that
there was no such dialog box during the installation.
*) Missing prompt for additional apt ressources (contrib, non-free,
non-us).
I hope this is helpful in some way.
best regards and thanks for the great work so far,
michael
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