success report with sparc and hppa cd images (with minor issues)

[Mark Montague <monty@gg.caltech.edu>]

Hi, cd-developers.

At Santiago's suggestion, I grabbed the cdimage-unofficial images of
cd 1 for both hppa and sparc (since I scavenged a sparc20 and an hp
735 for free). I now have both running the latest woody with no
serious problems.

I do have a couple of comments for each architecture, but nothing that
was a show-stopper for me.

for the Sparc:
-- making the boot floppy failed. It looked like the root image didn't
   have the right /dev/fd0 device file which the installer expected.

for the HP:
-- I needed to use a serial terminal as the console, since once the
   kernel booted, the CRX8 console didn't work. This could use better
   documentation, so I have a couple of suggestions for "README.txt":

   1) note that the "boot xxx -fl 0" allows you to change the terminal
   from tty0 to ttyS0 for serial console. I seem to remember that this
   is needed on a number of different HP machines
   2) get rid of the ARC/AlphaBIOS/MILO paragraph, since it clearly was
   copied from the alpha port

for the woody base install in general:

MAJOR ANNOYANCE (and trap for the naive installer):

even though I configured a static IP number in the install process,
the installer felt obligated to install the dhcp client, and set it to
start at boot time, and also runs it whenever it's installed or
updated. Since I'm on a net that does have a dhcp server, it ended up
clobbering my static net configuration several times at reboots,
apt-get upgrades, etc. as I went through the installation
process. Although for these machines, an eventual solution was just to
apt-get remove dhclient, I have another machine which has two net
cards, and dhcp's on one but not both, so it needs both flavors.

Anyway, since it's clear that dhcp support is vital for the install
process, it would be good to have the static IP option turn off
dhcp-client somehow... unfortunately, just disabling it in the rc's is
not sufficient, because the dhclient postinst starts dhcpd
regardless. I'll bug report this to dhcp-client as well.

minor issues:

-- a number of base packages complain that mime-support needs to be set
   up; the ones I had problems with were lynx, less, and lpr:

Setting up less (358-9) ...
Warning: could not read '/etc/mailcap' (update stopped) -- No such
file or directory
    restore from backup or delete and re-install mime-support package

-- cxref failed to unpack on the HP; it looks like it wants emacs19

The only one that was an actual pain for these disks is the
dhcp-client issue, excellent job otherwise.

				 thanks

					- M
--
Mark "Monty" Montague | monty@gg.caltech.edu  | I don't do Windows(tm)
		 main(){printf("I am self-aware\\n");}
	  <URL:http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~monty/monty.shtml>
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