Bug#622839: Debian installer fails at step "install base system" with claim that no suitable kernels can be found
Package: debian-installer
Version: Squeeze
When installing from the small cd amd64 wheezy (the netinst is build on
squeeze and the volume identifies as squeeze but I was installing
wheezy) in expert non-graphical mode, the installation fails during
install base system saying it's unable to find any suitable kernels, and
asking if I want to continue. Monitoring the install in a terminal, I
see that /target/etc/apt/sources.list, previously containing a
placeholder invalid line, has been blanked just before this error
message. There is an empty file in /tmp called something like valid
kernel versions. I was using LVM on top LUKS if that matters at all,
though it probably doesn't.
I was able to work around the issue by switching to a virtual terminal,
editing the sources file to include a Debian repository and manually
installing busybox then the kernel.
# Workaround
# When you see hte error Ctrl + F2 then <enter> to activate the console
echo "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free"
>> /target/etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install linux-image-2.6-amd64
# Ctrl + F1 and tell the box to continue installing without kernel.
One possible cause of this is that the expert mode install does not
configure system mirrors before installing base system. After I worked
around the error, the next step was to choose supplementary mirrors to
the netinst.
I can try to reenact the process later if more detail is needed and
record exactly all steps taken. It seems to be reproducible in that it
happened twice, though the first time I had manually set up partitions
because I wanted xts on my LUKS.
Reply to: