Bug#593998: installation-reports: Guided setup cannot install Desktop as root partition too small
Package: installation-reports
Severity: important
When installing Lenny using debian-505-i386-CD-1.iso downloaded via
bittorent from
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.5/i386/bt-cd/debian-505-i386-CD-1.iso.torrent
to install into a VM using VirtualBox 3.2.0_OSE r29652 running on Ubuntu
Lucid which had previously had gNewSense deltah successfully installed
and running on it. I encountered the problem:
"
[!!] Select and install software
Installation step failed
An installation step failed. You can try to run the failing item again
from the menu, or skip it and choose something else. The failing step
is: Select and install software
<Continue>
"
A similar error occurred when installing using both the normal text
installer and the graphical installer.
Examining the debug logs the first error is:
"failed in buffer_write(fd) (12, ret=-1): backend dpkg-deb during
`./usr/lib/openoffice/program/libcui680li.so': No space left on device"
I suspect that this is due to my choosing of the guided partitioner
(separate / and /home partitions) which though it had 8GB to use only allocated 2.5GB to / and used the rest for /home.
Unfortunately this is probably not enough disk space to do a graphical
installation of debian. It may therefore not be a sensible default to
use when more disk space is available as when someone selects guided
partitioning they are probably operating on the basis that they think
that the installer knows more about how their disk needs to be
partitioned to install debian.
As a workaround I configured the partitions manually to use 4GB for /
and this worked.
The full debug logs are available at:
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~drt24/debian/debian-lenny-select-and-install-software.debug.logs.tar.gz
Hopefully fixing this would only require a couple of lines in the guided
partitioner code to say something along the lines of "If I can fit the
recommended / partition size for Desktop in and still have 2GB left for
home then do that else use only 2.5GB". I suspect there will be similar
code which goes "If there is not 2.5GB available then bail with 'not
enough disk space'".
#415830 appears similar but the symptoms were very different (it
actually installed) and so the proposed solution much more complex.
Best regards,
Daniel
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