Package: installation-reports The following installation report was posted to debian-boot, and, according to my records, never followed up on. I am putting it in the BTS so it will not be lost. ----- Forwarded message from Yann Dirson <ydirson@fr.alcove.com> ----- From: Yann Dirson <ydirson@fr.alcove.com> Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 16:41:51 +0100 To: debian-boot@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: INSTALL REPORT with 2004-01-09 netinst, failed As I attempt to do more not-so-uncommon things (with the 2004-01-03 snapshot)... - I initially have a HD with a single ext3 partition + swap (from a previous RH install). If I repartition by deleting the ext3 and repartitionning that space in 2, on the partition setup screen I notice the 1st partition is already listed as ext3, and the 2nd not. Then I realize it comes from the previous (RH) install. I had not realized that when just selecting a single partition, when I thought "ext3" was just a default. Now if my original single-partition-over-RH had gone throught the reboot stage, I may surely have ended up with a strange install. And indeed the nc binary I had noticed, as well as the __libc_stack_end issues probably derive from that. -> Maybe the partition-setup screen could emphasize this issue ? -> How about forcing system partitions (/, /usr(/*)?, /var(/*)?) to be formatted, or at least require confirmation ? -> Is it really a good idea to use those programs just installed before rebooting ? - Now when I decide to split the existing partition in 2, but do not realize I must explicitely select "format as ext3", since my partition already appears as having ext3 selected (I thought), and go on, I'm brought back to the main menu on the next step, and requesting to install the base system brings me back there again almost instantly. Only by looking at syslog I finally notice a "read beyond end of device" attempt, which finally enlighten me on what's going on. -> the user should be notified of such errors by an error box. -> What about forcing the user to reformat such partitions, which we can decide must be invalid because they just reuse an existing block ? Or, probably better, when destroying a partition, we (cfdisk ?) could ask the user whether to nuke the 1st sectors, to avoid further misdetection. - Once base packages are unpacked, while setting up lilo, I'm now presented with a textbox containing the devfs name for the disk. If I want to install lilo in another location, it looks like I have to know the devfs path, whereas in the old installer I could choose in a list, which is much more suited to people not knowing devfs BTW, is it wise at all to use devfs, which is tagged as OBSOLETE in 2.6 !? - Selecting "French" as the keyboard layout after reboot, I do not have time to see the keymap name, and subsequent error message, before the next dialog screen. And I end up with a querty-looking layout. Looking at base-config.log, it appears that the selected layout is mac-usb-fr (!). That reminds me of a long-gone issue in console-tools debconf settings. Is it possible that some old config-scripts/templates are kept around ? Just after that, I get "KDGKBENT at index 128 in table 8: invalid argument", "failed to dump keymap" and "not loading keymap" messages, which may explain why I still have a qwerty layout. In the meantime, I was asked to enter the root password... and did that using the qwerty layout, which is sure to give me an unretrievable password when I change back to the correct layout (ie. fr-pc). If then I attempt to "loadkeys fr-pc" it works fine, but if I "install-keymap fr-pc" I get the same error messages. - When asked to select (again) an http mirror for downloading packages, 1) my previous selection is not the default, maybe because of 2) the country names being listed in english, despite all other text being correctly in french. However, the proxy information was correctly memorized. Regards, -- Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com> http://www.alcove.com/ Technical support manager Responsable de l'assistance technique Senior Free-Software Consultant Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres Debian developer (dirson@debian.org) Développeur Debian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- see shy jo
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