Re: slink: Which directory am I supposed to install from?

[Marc.Haber-lists@gmx.de (Marc Haber)]

On Mon, 24 May 1999 14:42:17 +0100 (BST), you wrote:
>On Mon, 24 May 1999 Marc.Haber-lists@gmx.de wrote:
>>What if I don't have a locally installed CD drive? I usually copy the
>>base system to the hard disk and install from there. Sure, it's
>>possible to have both /install and
>>/dists/slink/main/disks-i386/2.1.8-1999-02-22 copied to the hard disk,
>>but this means having significant information doubled.
>
>OK, that makes things a little clearer. Anyway, checking on the CD,
>/install/boot.bat and /dists.../install.bat do effectively the same job.

Why are they named differently then? This is more than only mildly
confusing.

>This confuses me a little - how are you getting a kernel without the SCSI
>drivers from one but not the other?

This is what I am asking :-)

>Ah, hang on - you're not using the
>laptop (tecra) kernel on one of these are you?

How do I select this? No, I am not aware of having done different
procedures with both installation tries. Does the script silently
decide to install a "smaller" kernel?

When starting /install/boot.bat, I need the CD (or the files from
/dists/.../disks-i386/current/) to install kernel and device driver
modules (it seems to need drv1440.bin which is not included in
/install). The system installed by that procedure seems to work
reasonably well.

This installation has this kernel:
/vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36
715260 May 24 1999 /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36


Installing from /dists.../install.bat naturally doesn't need any
additional files and yields the same installation this time.

I have to apologize. Obviously, I must have made some funky mistake
last week. In fact, both /install and /dists..../disks-i386/current
seem to yield working systems with NCR support.

>Explanation: the .../disks-i386/ tree is the place where the boot-floppies
>and documentation are placed first. The CD build script tries to make
>things easier for new users by adding copies of most of this stuff (docs
>and boot kernels) in an easier-to-find location (/install). The two should
>be functionally identical.

But this script surely doesn't rename a file from install.bat to
boot.bat, does it? There must be something different going on than
simple copies.

>Actually, thinking about things a bit more: why are you copying just the
>base files to a local hard disk? Are you then using NFS or similar to
>install the rest?

Yes. On some systems, I only transfer the debs needed to get the box
on to the network on the hard disk.

>If so, just using the boot/root floppy should cope with
>that.

These are two floppies. And I _hate_ floppies. Slow and unreliable. A
royal pain.

>>I failed it since it needed files from the
>>/dists/slink/main/disks-i386/2.1.8-1999-02-22 directory. I thought
>>"cool, there is a base system too, so I probably don't need that
>>/install stuff" and started over with the other base system.
>
>Hmmm...

If this way of doing an install is a non-option, it should be clearly
documented.

Oh btw, dbootstrap's error reporting needs to be improved. While doing
the experiments, dbootstrap at one time gave me the error message
"installing device driver floppy failed". This error message is next
to useless. The install system does not have syslog so there is no
chance to learn what went wrong. Repeating the mkfs on that partition
solved the issue, but I still don't know what exactly went wrong.

Also, the html documents in /install have links to a document called
"index.html". Such a file does not exist, I suppose that install.html
is meant instead. Which package do I file that bug against?

Also, I feel that there should be an option to skip dselect
altogether.

A third thing: dbootstrap denies installing lilo into a logical drive
and insists on installing it into the extended partition instead. The
reason is that the standard MBR bootstrap code can't load lilo from a
logical drive. Some boot managers (most notably my favorite, xfdisk)
can indeed boot from a logical drive. So I have to manually edit
/target/etc/lilo.conf and re-invoke lilo to correct dbootstrap. I
strongly feel that dbootstrap has a point in reminding me that I won't
be able to boot my system using standard mechanisms, but shouldn't
deny me my wish. There should be an "I mean it, really" option with
dbootstrap.

Greetings
Marc

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