Christian Perrier wrote:
Quoting John (summer@cds.merseine.nu):I'm attempting a network install of Sarge. I PXE-booted off my LAN. Since my local mirror is incomplete I'm installing through my modem.I've discovered that d-i is downloading lots of stuff it won't need - pcmcia stuff, firewire stuff etc.Well, before running hardware detection phase, the installer does not know about your hardware, so it downloads what could be needed...:-)
I'm asking out of ignorance here.... How hard is it to detect whether there is any pcmcia hardware?I actually saw a package of firewire goodies. Does /proc/pci tell you whether there is _any_ firewire? If not, is there another simple test?
Worse, it's downloading modules for two kernels. Since it booted a 2.4 kernel, it can't possibly use 2.6 modules.But you can ask it to install a 2.6 kernel in base-installer....this is a medium priority question you may not see if running a default install.
If it didn't pop the question, I expect it has a default answer? (btw it was actually three kernels). Would the default be the running kernel?
More, my boot kernel (I must upgrade it!) is 2.4.20, so it can't use the 2.4.26-1-386 or 2.4.24-speakup modules either.IMV it should only download modules for the boot kernel, and for required features. This may require finding some things about the target environment before downloading great gobs of stuff.Well, as mentioned above the general design choices have been made for having d-i as versatile as possible. This includes the choice of downloading a lot of stuff, sure. A part of this design choice is motivated by the fact that people with low bandwidth will probably use full CD images (which are currently not available....but using netinst images should be a good idea in your case).
Is this netinst?Jul 7 05:22:51 ns in.tftpd[11956]: RRQ from 192.168.9.133 filename /PXE/images/sarge/vmlinuz Jul 7 05:22:52 ns in.tftpd[11957]: RRQ from 192.168.9.133 filename /PXE/images/sarge/net-initrd.gz
Even if bandwidth didn't cause problems, the fact that it downloads so much junk means I can't install in 64 Mbytes. I've got a stack of these machines so high I can't jump over them. They don't have CD drives either.
This approach of downloading lots of junk also goes to make it harder to wrap a GUI around d-i, or to add vnc, telnet and/or ssh support (useful on zSeries and such headless boxes).
atm I'm downloading Joey's latest nightly build. I'm also looking at firewall/squid|apache magic.