no support for anything but ext2?
Hello,
I am trying to install current Debian testing on i386. I have experience
with SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake but none with Debian, so please forgive
me if I am missing some obvious Debianness. :-)
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be support for any filesystems
except for ext2. I already have a reiserfs partition that I want to
install on. If reiserfs is unworkable, then I'd be willing to use ext3
or try xfs or jfs, but I don't want to settle with ext2.
I downloaded this ISO image, dated 21/02/2004, with jigdo:
http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/cd/jigdo-area/i386/sarge-i386-1.jigdo
The CD boots fine and the installation gets to the point where it starts
cfdisk. I just quit it because the partitions are already as I want them
(and it correctly shows hda3 as reiserfs). Then it asks me about
mounting the filesystem, so I choose hda3. It gives me a choice to use
the partition as it is, or to format it with ext2, or to make it swap,
or abort. This is the first surprise: there's no other filesystem to
choose than ext2. But, I figured that perhaps there's at least support
for mounting the filesystem if not creating it. Alas, it seems not. When
I tell it to mount the partition, it pretends that everything's fine and
starts installing. After a minute or so, it says there was a problem in
debootstrap and that's it. I start up a shell and find out that:
- /target is not a mount point - it's in the ramdisk, and it's full (df
shows 100MB used out of 100MB). I suppose that the target filesystem
should be mounted there?
- cat /proc/filesystems shows only ext2, isofs and vfat (IIRC) and a
bunch of nodev filesystems - no reiser, xfs, jfs or even ext3.
- /lib/modules/(whatever)/fs contains only isofs and vfat (again, IIRC).
I googled around and found some messages in mailing lists that said that
reiserfs is supported. So I thought perhaps I need to download a current
version of the installer? So I downloaded:
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/floppy/boot.img
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/floppy/root.img
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/floppy/cd-drivers.img
and after throwing out four faulty floppies, I managed to write the
images. (I didn't want to waste another CDR.) Unfortunately, the
situation is virtually identical, except for the fact that there is now
a graphical boot screen, and that the installer auto-configures my
network and downloads some parts of itself off it, without even
bothering to check whether they are on the CD, which I suppose they are
(and the drivers are loaded).
So, is there anything else I'm supposed to download? Or perhaps some
boot-time parameter? Or is it simply currently broken?
Thanks for any advice!
--
Vaclav Dvorak <vdvo@vdvo.net>
http://www.vdvo.net/
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