I believe I have found a bug in the Lenny installer on UltraSPARC. This is during the partitioning phase. I can specify the partitions just fine. However, when I'm done, and I choose "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk", I get back to the "Partition Disks: This is an overview of your currently configured partitions and mount points..." screen. This is on the 2008-04-30 weekly image of the NetInstall CD-ROM image (the 110MB image).
To reproduce:
Go through the installation program and choose "expert" mode.
Install normally, choosing sane stuff.
Manually specify your partitioning.
After you're done, choose "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk".
What happens:
You get put right back to the "Partition Disks" screen, with a list of the partitions that you made. You never do get to proceed forward in the installation from here.
There is an option to "Go back", which I did choose, thinking, "maybe the partitions were made, and there's just a minor bug. I'll just choose the "Install the base system" option and keep going. Well, no, that doesn't work. Attempting this produces a message saying the following:
"This installtion step depends on one or more steps that have not yet been performed. Choose an installation step:"
"Partition disks" is the step here. Choosing that simply puts you right back into the endless loop of "Partition Disks". Apparently there is no way to proceed beyond this point.
I also tried going to vty4 (Ctrl-Alt-F4) to see if there were any log messages. Besides a couple of entries relating to /dev/fd0 and /dev/cdrom, there weren't any new ones until I chose "Go back", at which piont the following messages appeared:
main-menu[701]: INFO: (process:18081): /lib/partman/check.d/05silo_check: .: line 10: can't open /lib/partman/definitions.sh
main-menu[701]: INFO: (process:18081): /lib/partman/check.d/05silo_check: .: line 10: can't open /lib/partman/definitions.sh
main-menu[701]: INFO: Menu item 'bootstrap-base' succeeded but requested to be left unconfigured.
I've also installed Debian Lenny on i386 and have not seen this problem come up. Matter of fact, the installation for Debian Lenny on i386 went smooth as ice. I'm only seeing this on the SPARC image created on 30 April 2008; a previous Lenny/SPARC image (late March) did not exhibit this particular issue.
--TP
______________________________________
Terrell Prudé, Jr., Network Analyst
Fairfax County Public Schools, Dept. of IT
Network Management Services (NMS)
(703) 329-7575