some questions about RC3
I ran the network installation CD (RC3) yesterday on x86 and have a
few questions and comments. Some of the questions are probably stupid
but I hope not all of them are, and even the stupid questions might
indicate weaknesses in the documentation.
Is there any way of using the Debian installation CD as a fancy
bootloader, i.e. use it to load a kernel from another disc? If not,
can anyone recommend a CD for doing that?
(It might be a useful feature in an installation CD. Perhaps you could
do it with GRUB or with the kernel itself. I heard about a patch that
lets you use Linux as a bootloader.)
Is it possible to use the Debian installation CD to boot with a root
file system that is a reiserfs? If so, what are the command-line
arguments for doing that? Something with initrd, or is that just LILO?
I found the bit of the installer where it asks where to install GRUB
somewhat unfriendly because it doesn't give much advice and the two
different ways of numbering partitions don't help. However, I don't
have any concrete suggestions about how to improve it, so this isn't a
very helpful comment.
I had to switch off the machine about 90% of the way through a 4.5
hour download of the packages. I was disappointed to find that when I
rebooted the machine it started again from the beginning because
apt-get inself has no problem with continuing after an interruption.
So the installer deletes /var/cache/apt/archives/*, does it? Why? Is
there a work-around? For example, could I tell the installer not to
install anything and then use apt-get manually instead? If so, what
are the pseudopackages corresponding to the options that the installer
offers (workstation, web server, etc)?
In general, I often find it unclear how to later change something that
was specified during the installation. For example, the installer asks
for the hostname and the domain. How would I change that after
installing?
Thanks for any advice.
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