Bug#270599: Floppy install on Oldworld PowerMac
On Friday, September 10, 2004, at 05:04 PM, Rick Thomas wrote:
The "ofonlyboot" has not changed. It reads and inverts the colors
of the tuxmac, but never switches to text-mode screen from the
inverted color tuxmac.
The boot floppy reads and switches to the text screen then asks
for the root floppy, which it reads. It then asks for language
(English) and location (US) (but not keyboard layout) then invites
me to load drivers from a floppy. I gave it the "root-2" floppy
and it complained about not being able to find any kernel drivers
on that floppy. I chose <go back> and re-executed "load drivers
from a floppy". This time I gave it the net-drivers floppy, and
it was happy. Still thinking that we wouldn't get any where
without the root-2 floppy loading (and being a bit bull headed
anyway) I tried "load drivers from floppy" for the third time, and
again fed it the root-2. It complained again about not finding
any kernel modules. This time I told it to "continue without
loading drivers" and to my amazement, it started decoding the
stuff from the root-2 floppy! Curioser and curioser!
I think it was at this point that it asked for my keyboard layout,
and suggested "European" as default, even though I had given it
every reason to suspect that US-English was my preferred locale.
I've reported this violation of the principle of least
astonishment before.
It proceeded then to find my ethernet interface (remember I'd
loaded the net-drivers floppy earlier) and do DHCP discovery on
it. This succeeded, as expected. When it asked, I chose the
uchicago mirror as usual, and it loaded the installer-components
list (I think -- I didn't get the exact words) after which it
*again* complained about not finding any kernel modules! I told
it to continue anyway, and it started downloading and unpacking
installer components from the uchicago mirror (presumably).
When it got done with that and moved on to the partitioner, it
couldn't find any of my disks (not my IDE main disk or my SCSI Zip
disk). The only IDE think it knew about was the CD-ROM drive.
Exploring on the F2 console showed that it wasn't just the
partitioner that was confused. There was no evidence of IDE or
SCSI disks in /proc or /dev. (Same as last time -- no progress on
that front...)
So I wrapped it up and took a tea break to write this report.
I have to consider the check for kernel modules at inappropriate
times to be a serious bug...
I tried again with the latest floppies:
Index of /~luther/d-i/images/daily/powerpc/floppy-2.4
Name Last modified Size Description
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Parent Directory 26-Aug-2004 21:35 -
asian-root.img 13-Sep-2004 03:16 1.2M
boot.img 13-Sep-2004 03:17 1.4M
cd-drivers.img 13-Sep-2004 03:17 1.4M
net-drivers.img 13-Sep-2004 03:17 1.4M
ofonlyboot.img 13-Sep-2004 03:17 1.4M
root-2.img 13-Sep-2004 03:17 1.4M
root.img 13-Sep-2004 03:18 1.3M
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apache/1.3.26 Server at people.debian.org Port 80
No change.
1) The ofonlyboot still doesn't give me a text screen.
2) Loading the root-2 floppy still gives me an error message about
not finding any driver modules, which I ignore and it loads the
root-2 floppy anyway.
3) No reasonable combination of choice of mirrors
(ftp.us.debian.org vs debian.uchicago.edu) and distributions
(testing vs unstable) give me anything but "no disks found".
4) For what it's worth, at least one combination of mirror and
distro (I don't remember exactly which -- I *think* it was uchicago
and testing) complained about not being able to find any driver
modules (presumably) on the mirror. But the other combinations
didn't complain. (So maybe the uchicago unstable distro does have
driver modules for the 2.4.27 kernel, but their testing
doesn't... Does that make sense? Is there any way to check this?)
5) Two of the 2.6 floppy images are still too large to fit on a
physical 1.44 MB disk.
Any thoughts?
Rick
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