d-i daily failures
Hi,
I don't want this to go through the BTS because I currently don't
have all the necessary information for a good bug report. And I
cannot yet write a "installation report"/rant like last time (see
Bug #691366)...
However, I recently tried to set up two systems for work with the
amd64 daily netinst builds of the Debian-installer. And the trials
failed.
I just want to give a short outline of the problems. Maybe it can
help to find bugs and improve the software.
First system: a DELL Intel i7 Desktop PC with Ubuntu pre-installed.
The 2013-05-31 daily build booted grub and everything worked, but
when the installer opened nothing happened anymore. This is/was
either an USB problem (mouse and keyboard are attached using USB; so
perhaps the USB modules were not inserted) or the installer just froze.
So the only thing that worked was GRUB before the installer.
Since Ubuntu was already installed, I think Secure Boot and (U)EFI
f*ckups were already disabled (I think something like "Legacy BIOS"
foo was enabled).
Solution: I found an old CD with a debian-installer of Debian 6.0.6
that worked well ;-) [However, I had to update the system to testing
to make everything work.]
Second system: a Fujitsu Lifebook T902 (Intel i5) laptop
with Windows 8 pre-installed. After disabling Secure Boot and
FastBoot (and reordering the boot sequence, of course), GRUB of the
2013-06-05 d-i daily image came up. First note: it came up in pure
text mode (without fancy background images, just plain dark cyan)
but much larger than 80x25. When I started the installer, GRUB
outputed errors with something like "Module linux not found",
"Module initrd not found" and got back to the main menu. After
pressing "e" I saw that linux and initrd are the two commands used
in the GRUB configuration for the installer.
Solution: yet unsolved due to lack of time. And I don't really want
to use the Debian 6.0.6 CD again...
Ah, and another note: in both cases I booted from a USB stick.
The USB stick seems to have 2 partitions. In GRUB I saw that the USB
stick contains a "setup.exe", so I booted Windows 8 and wanted to
see what it is for. However, in Windows 8 I was only capable of
accessing the first partition that only contains an efi directory
and a .efi file - in other words, setup.exe (seemingly there for
Windows users) can't be accessed in Windows.
Best
Stephan
PS: I still dislike that the choice of the default Desktop
environment has to be made in GRUB instead of the Debian installer
itself. Is this a design decision or is this based on some technical
difficulties?
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