Bug#394743: Installation-report: Several minor problems during installation
On Sunday 22 October 2006 21:49, Patrick Häcker wrote:
> Comments/Problems:
> Overall setup went fine, but there were several minor problems:
>
> - With a German setup there are no umlauts in the output of console 4.
> Instead of the umlaut built by "ae" (an "a"
> with 2 dots above) the computer prints an upper case "A" folled by a
> character which looks like a filled square.
> After the installation (reboot) the umlauts worked in the console.
Known issue, but as most of what's logged is in English, it's not
something that has high priority for us. You can always view
/var/log/syslog in an editor (the installer has nano) to work around this.
> - I installed the desktop task on a 2.4 GB partition, which was too
> small so the installation stopped after
> downloading all packages and installing most of them. This is quite
> frustrating if you have a slow internet
> connection. It should be possible to estimate the necessary partition
> size after choosing tasks and abort or at least
> print a warning message if the available space is too small.
Unfortunately we cannot get the information we need for that. The
installation guide has the minimal size requirements (although these have
not yet been updated for Etch).
> - Having a not big enough partition and unused diskspace directly in
> front of the partition I switched to another
> console and startet "parted" after the installation has aborted. But
> "parted" wasn't able to resize the ext3
> partition created by the debian installer some minutes ago. Error
> Message: "Error: File System has an incompatible
> feature enabled".
If you can identify which "feature" was blocking the resize, the parted
maintainers will probably be happy to look into this. Please file a
separate bug report against parted.
> It would be quite handy if the parted version in the debian installer
> could handle the partition created by the
> debian installer, wouldn't it?
> So I had to go back to partitioning and choose a larger partition.
> There was no reboot necessary, which is great!
The installer itself is also capable of resizing partitions, but as it
uses libparted as well, that could run into the same issue.
> - I didn't choose a swap partition as I have 768 MB RAM. But debian
> installer printed a warning like: "You could get
> problems during installation if you don't have enough memory". This
> sounds like the debian installer would have no
> idea how much memory in my system is installed, which is definetely not
> the case and I'm quite sure you know how
> much memory D-I needs, so please only print this warning message if the
> user doesn't create a swap partition AND has
> not enough memory, as a normal user could get confused by this message.
I guess we could check for "obviously enough memory". But no, we do not
know exactly how much memory the installer uses as that depends on the
architecture, installation method used and optional features used.
For example, the graphical installer uses significantly more memory than
the regular installer. And an installation using LVM or crypto also uses
more memory than an install that does not.
It is also dangerous to hardcode values like that as at some point you may
run over them. IMO the warning is worded neutrally enough so it is not
alarmist and as you are free to ignore it, I don't think we should change
it. swap-less installations are very uncommon, so having a check for it
and asking the user to confirm he does not want swap IMO makes sense.
> - grub did not detect my Debian Sarge installation on /dev/hdc1
> (reiserfs).
That is not grub, but os-prober.
Could you check if the /var/log/installer/syslog contains any indication
why this failed?
Would you be willing to debug this for us?
> - grub detected my installed Windows 98 (/dev/hda1) and Windows 2000
> (/dev/hda5) (huh, these were dark times!), but
> failed to name the Windows 98 partition correctly.
> To understand my point you first have to know the following: Windows
> 2000 installed its boot manager in the Windows 98 partition.
> I know this is not the easiest way, but it's the default, which Woody
> and Sarge created.
No, Woody and Sarge have never set up a Windows 2000 bootloader in a
Windows 98 partition. That is something you have must done yourself, and
it is indeed what confuses the installer. I don't think we can improve
the detection of this.
Fixing it is trivial though: just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst.
> But as I checked: Booting /dev/hda5 out of grub doesn't work.
Must be because you told Windows 2000 to install its bootloader in the
Windows 98 partition. Again somewhat unusual and not something we can
easily support.
> All the following observations propably don't affect D-I but I don't
> know where to report it. So please forward it to
> the correct package or point me to the desired place.
>
> Wouldn't it be a nearly perfect guess if you assume that
> "A" should have "L" as the default language in
> Gnome if the desktop task gets installed as well?
This should be fixed in current installations.
The remaining issues are indeed not related to the installer. Please file
separate bug reports against the respective packages if you want to
follow up on them.
Cheers,
FJP
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