Bug#270599: Floppy install on Oldworld PowerMac
On Wednesday, September 8, 2004, at 05:18 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 04:17:55AM -0400, Rick_Thomas wrote:
Package: installation-reports
powerpc boot-floppy 20040906 OldWorld PowerMac
...
Then I tried the "boot" floppy. It gave me the tuxmac and made
reading noises. After a while it ejected the boot floppy and switched
to a text mode screen at (I think) 640x480 resolution. This is good
enough for installing -- but not satisfactory for long term usage.
Yes, i guess quik-installer should allow you to use further kernel
options.
You could create your own miboot floppy, and then you can add the
options you
want, more on this below.
For the time being, just adding "DEBCONF_PRIORITY=medium" to the
standard "boot" floppy would be a major good-thing.
Frankly, I think that "medium" priority would be acceptable as a
default mode for floppy boots. It's nice to minimize user
interaction and all, but if I'm going to all the trouble of burning
a bunch of floppies, I want a reasonable amount of control over the
details of the installation process. I don't think inexperienced
users will find the "medium" priority dialogue any more confusing
than the existing "woody" installer. Just my opinion -- YMMV, of
course.
It called for the root floppy, so I fed it that, which it read
happily. After reading the root floppy and asking me some questions
about languages and locations, it asked if I wanted to read a driver
floppy. I said yes and fed it the "root-2" floppy.
Well, i fixed the root-2 thingy earlier, so it is nice that it
works, even if
there is no real support for this in the installer yet. Feel free to
participate in the fixing of this, be it only by suggesting what
the root-2
asking question should be, and where it should be asked. Ideally
we would add
a load-second-root-floppy .udeb, which would present a menu and
load the
second floppy, and which would be part of the first root floppy.
A special "load-root-2.udeb" (or whatever) may not be necessary:
Just think of everything after the "root" as "extra installer
component" floppies (or some such) rather than "driver" floppies
specifically. Simply modify the existing dialogue to end with a
question "Do you want to load another installer component?" If the
answer is "yes" loop back and re-execute. If the answer is "no",
make a normal return. The first pass through is mandatory and
loads the "root-2" floppy. All subsequent passes are optional,
based on what kind of installation you want to do.
One thing to be careful of: It will be necessary to craft the
wording of the dialogue questions very carefully so that the user
understands fully what is going on, and what is required of them,
at each step.
The root-2 floppy contains stuff (namely netcfg and co) that was
spilled out
from the first root floppy.
That's pretty much what I figured was going on.
My choice of "root-2" at this point was based on a hunch. There was
no indication of which driver floppy it was expecting (Indeed, it was
not clear at all that "root-2" was a "driver" floppy. My hunch was
that it would be needed immediately and that the easiest way to add
files to the ram-disk root was to emulate a driver floppy.) It would
be better to out-and-out say "root-2" if that's what is wanted.
Like Joeyh mentioned, right now there is support for loading only
one drivers
floppy, which may well be buggy in itself, and maybe a question
for asking for
an additional floppy like asking for additional apt sources later
on may be
welcome. Also, the root-2 is not really a drivers floppy, but
should be loaded
earlier on, maybe.
I have no problem with answering questions about language and
location before loading additional installer components. I'd go
ahead and leave it right where it is in the sequence, if that's
easiest.
It then tried to detect my network interface and failed, so it asked
Because the net drivers are not on the floppy.
for the network drivers floppy, which I gave it. This time it
succeeded in finding my network interface and configured it via DHCP
Woaw. I was under the impression that this would fail, from
joeyh's comment
about only one driver floppy, but this is great.
Right. This is what makes me think we can use the existing
framework to load an arbitrary number of extra "installer
component" floppies.
(I would have preferred the option to do this manually, but there
is no
way to specify "DEBCONF_PRIORITY=medium" in booting an oldworld pmac
Like said, if you build your own miboot floppy, you can add any kernel
arguments you like. As miboot is non-free, users may be forced to
do this
anyway, so ...
Yuch! Please don't force inexperienced users to build their own
"boot" floppy. You'll loose a large class of potential users if
you do.
machine from floppy.) It asked for a mirror, and I specified the
uchicago one since it seems to be fastest and most reliable from my
little corner of the Internet.
Overcool.
Note 2:
Things proceeded more or less as expected until it came time to
partition the disk. The partitioner could not find any disks to
partition! Switching to the F2 console and poking about, it became
clear that this was *not* just a problem with the partitioner -- the
only ide device present, as far as the kernel was concerned, was the
CD-ROM drive. My IDE disk was nowhere to be found! There was no
"/dev/discs" directory, and there was just the CD-ROM drive in the
/proc/ide directory. Very strange!
There have been a few problems with partman lately, starting with
the broken
no_media handling, and then following with the missing dependency
of parted
1.6.11-2, which is fixed in 1.6.11-3. Please try again with todays
floppies,
and if it doesn't fix the problem, we need to investigate what
driver is
missing or something.
I'll try the new floppies tonight. Getting log files for debugging
may not be as easy as it sounds, though. At the end of the above
process, I thought it would be nice to hae the log files for
review, so I put a Mac-formatted (HFS) floppy in the drive and went
to the "F2" console, and typed:
mkdir /mnt ; mount -t hfs /dev/floppy/0 /mnt
(I'm doing this from memory -- I think I got the devfs name of the
floppy device right. I'm sure it was right when I typed it -- I
verified the syntax with "ls" before using it)
It said there was no such device and refused to do the mount.
I seem to remember I reported having a similar problem trying to do
a "save log files" during a BootX/cd-based install.
If it comes to that point, I'll take better notes the next time.
Final note:
Throughout this process, except for once when it asked for the "root"
floppy, it never ejected the previous floppy. On a Mac, this means I
have to manually eject the floppy with a bent paperclip. Mac floppy
drives do not have an "eject" button the way PC floppy drives do.
This is annoying to experienced folks, and will be confusing to
inexperienced users.
This is indeed a problem, and it may be worth to include the
(small) eject
.udeb in the first root floppy, and add eject support in the
revamping of the
floppy request .udeb (floppy-loader, right ?).
I think this would be a very good idea.
Thanks for your installation report.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
You're very welcome. Thanks for all the good work, yourself!
Rick
Reply to: