Bug#492331: installation-report: a few glitches
On Mon 28 Jul 2008, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 01:27:29PM +0200, Paul Slootman wrote:
> > - I chose expert install. What's the difference with the normal install?
> > I didn't really detect anything that was particularly "expert"...
>
> The difference between "expert" and "normal" installation is just a
> matter of debconf priority. Normal installations just show debconf
> questions with priority high or critical. Expert adds medium on top of
> that.
Hmm, OK; perhaps that could be made a bit more clear, that this concerns
the debconf questions? I expected "expert" to e.g. do manual
partitioning be default instead of the guided partitioning; that sort of
thing.
> > - It was impossible to setup the disk layout I wanted:
> > - root on raid1 over 2 partitions
> > - ditto swap and /boot
> > - /var and other things on LVM on RAID1
> > [???]
> > In short, most of the configuration entered was not remembered when
> > "writing to disk".
>
> Known issues, see #391479, #391483, #393728, #398668, #475479. Should
> be fixed before Lenny.
OK, great. I thought I should mention it as when I last did this in
april with the installer then (I believe I did use the testing
installer) it all worked fine, and this was now a regression.
> > - The question "should root be allowed to login" should indicate that this
> > includes the console; I was thinking of ssh access. BTW, I think that
> > offering to install an ssh server should also be asked, I expect that to
> > always be there... which is a pain if you install the server somewhere
> > and can't access it remotely.
>
> Are you talking about the following template?
>
> Allow login as root? If you choose not to allow root to log in, then
> a user account will be created and given the power to become root
> using the 'sudo' command.
>
> I don't see how exacltly it could be improved, as it seems pretty
> obvious to me that this is a system-wide setting.
It didn't occur to me that restricting root access to the console would
be something useful... I guess it may be :-) I expected this to concern
the AllowRootLogin parameter for the ssh daemon.
Being able to supply a root password e.g. when entering single user mode
after the filesystem check has failed would still be useful, methinks?
What is the procedure in such cases? Reboot with kernel parameter
init=/bin/bash? That seems rather extreme...
> > - After selecting the tasks I was hoping to be dumped into aptitude to
> > fine-tune the packages; that didn't happen. Did I miss the choice for
> > aptitude somewhere? I did choose "expert install", so I expect to be
> > offered a bit more control...
>
> AFAIK, you did not miss it. People who want fine tuning of their
> packages usually unselect every tasks and start installing packages with
> a plain base system after the first reboot.
I recall that at least in earlier versions of the installer I was given
the option to run aptitude interactively after the task selection stage.
I was expecting that now as well, and ended up downloading 175MB of
archives of which I probably didn't need 60%.
> > - I didn't get any chance to enter anything for the mail config, hence this
> > is going out as from "paul@moordrecht.gps.nl" while it should be just
> > "paul@gps.nl" for this system. I need to fix /etc/mailname...
> > So please reply to paul@debian.org :-)
>
> This used to be the case. Being offline, I can't point you to the
> discussion which lead to this decision, but laptop and desktop users
> usually don't need to configure a full mail daemon.
Especially laptop an desktop users won't use hostname + domainname as
the default mail domain...
> "dpkg-reconfigure exim4" can also be done after the first reboot.
root@moordrecht:~# dpkg-reconfigure exim4
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: exim4 is not installed
You would have to know that the package to reconfigure is exim4-config ...
> > - The rescue boot also asks for hostname, domainname, country, etc.,
> > so I was a bit worried that I was simply doing an install again.
> > Why is that info necessary for a rescue console?
>
> Location and language are asked because rescue mode is also localized
> and having help messages in your native language is a desirable choice.
> Same for keyboard layout. The network configuration is done because
> rescue mode might need to retrieve installer components only available
> from a Debian mirror.
>
> IIRC, these are the only questions currently asked. Both newt and GTK+
No, I am sure that I was asked for hostname and domainname. That was
when I started worrying...
> frontend displays a label with "Rescue mode" on top of the screen.
> Should another message be added in your opinion?
I did see that, but I'm not sure whether that was displayed the whole
time. I'll retry it when I get the chance.
thanks,
Paul Slootman
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