an installation
Today I happened to encounter a Debian installation that had progressed
until halfway - I do not know anything about what had happened before.
It reboots, asks for a server (I gave one), asks for a type of system
(I said desktop), asked for some X details, and then started unpacking
lots of packages - heaps of garbage, but maybe that had been requested
in some earlier part of the installation. The disk could hold 2 GB
and was easily filled completely. Then the installation process ended
in a rather sad way. "No space left on device"
Afterwards all went very wrong, not surprisingly.
Semi-installed packages. Semi-configured packages. Chaos.
There are error messages that tell me to run "dpkg --configure -a",
but that command fails: "No space left on device".
The installer loops:
info: switching console charset mapping to ISO-8859-1
Configuring the base system
info: switching console charset mapping to ISO-8859-1
Configuring the base system
probably because of the line
1: /usr/sbin/termwrap /usr/sbin/base-config
in /etc/inittab.
Everything I touch warns about possible database corruption.
In short, a badly failed installation.
The reason I report this is mainly that I consider it a bug when the
installer does not check sizes and happily kills itself and the
installation process by filling the disk completely.
Don't know whether such a failed installation can be rescued -
expect that a complete reinstall will be required.
Andries
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