Bug#248213: Install report for AlphaServer 1000A 5/300

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

clone 248213 -1
reassign -1 partman-auto
retitle -1 needs recipe for alpha/aboot
thanks

* Sam Powers <sam@oddbox.org> [2004-05-09 14:08]:
> Install base system: [E]
> First, I tried partitioning my disk with ext3 on all partitions, and it
> turns out that aboot doesn't like anything but ext2. This impacted the
> base system installation only once I created a 16mb /boot ext2
> partition, which, it turns out, is about 1mb too small for the
> kernel-image package to create its initrd, and about 5mb too small for
> comfort. After I made a 64mb partition, base system installation worked
> just fine. It's just a shame that space that packages use in their
> postinst can't be predicted pre-installation, or it might have been easy
> to return a non-confusing error message.
> 
> Install boot loader:    [E]
> Since I'm pretty new to Alpha hardware, I didn't know
> that I needed to leave several blocks at the beginning of the disk for
> aboot, I just sort of assumed that the blocks would be reserved, as they
> are on x86. This caused the "Install Boot Loader" step to fail, because
> swriteboot refused to overwrite the beginning of my boot partition.

This means that partman-auto needs a recipe for alpha to create these
partitions.  Also, aboot-installer should have better finish.d checks
(vorlon added some, but I'm not sure if they check all of the above).

> I had a problem after rebooting for 2 reasons.. The default aboot
> configuration referenced vmlinuz and initrd.img instead of their full
> names. No symlinks were created to allow this to work. The other problem
> was that ramdisk_size wasn't big enough, as vorlon said in his install
> report.

vorlon, has this been fixed?

Sam, can you give the image at
http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/sarge_d-i/ a go and tell us
how well that works.  We're currently preparing for a new release
(rc1) and it would be good to have a successful report on alpha.
(vorlon is away from his Alpha because he's at DebConf).
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com