Re: Installing Etch beta
Hi Steve
Yes there are people out here.
With regards testing. I was trying to load Sarge on a dual Xeon Intel server (built from individually sourced components though). The configuration is as follows.
1. Intel SE 7501 BR2 Motherboard
2. A System Harddrive and ATAPI drive on one IDE channel.
3. 2 Maxtor 250 Gig drives on the other IDE channel.
4. A Medley RAID or ATA controller on the PCI bus.
5. 2 Maxtor 250 Gig drives on the Medley.
6. 5 SCSI drives on the SCSI controller.
7. Dual 1.8 Gig Xeon
The intention here was to use the Medley card as an ATA controller and to arrange the 4 Maxtors into a software RAID 5 device. I tried Sarge 3.1 r2 but the setup programme would not allow the two Maxtors to be set as RAID devices.
I got the RAID/ATA controller (the Medley card, for some reason its got a lot of names) from ebuyer. When I run lspci the following details are returned.
"Silicon Image, Inc. (formerly CMD Technology Inc) PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller (rev 02)"
I got the email about the Etch Beta and thought I would try it out as I was having no luck with Sarge. It allowed the two Maxtors on the Medley RAID card to be set as RAID devices. Then I configured a Multiple Device and chose RAID 5. Then it went to the next step but it wasn't telling me what was happening. There was a solid blue screen, nothing else. To me it looked like the setup process had jammed, I waited a while, but with nothing happening I aborted.
I tried Sarge again and the harddrives now appeared as RAID devices, thanks to Etch. Once again I went in and configured a Multiple Device and then it seemed to do the same again. There was just a blue screen with nothing happening. By now I had time to collect my wits, perhaps there was some formating or something like that to be done. So I went out for a few hours. When I came back it was still on the same unresponsive blue screen. However I was patient and eventually it went to the next step. In retrospect the drive LEDS were flashing, I could have used them as an indication, but that's very low level.
There was no status report for what was being done after the configuration of the Multiple Device, not in Etch nor in Sarge.
One of the may attractions of Etch is the encrypted drive functionality.
Best regards
Robin Doveton
Steve McIntyre wrote ..
> It's been a while; here's some news, some plans and a plea for help.
>
> Work towards etch
> =================
>
> We released etch d-i beta 3[1] a couple of weeks back. So far, things
> seem to be going generally OK in testing. Daily builds of business
> card and netinst images and weekly builds of full CD and DVD sets have
> since restarted, and we plan to continue with those.
>
> Sarge r3
> ========
>
> There were some delays and problems in releasing the third
> point-release of sarge on CD and DVD, including the now-traditional
> spectres of hardware failure and repetitive debian-cd runs to optimise
> the layouts for the CDs and DVDs. In the end, the final images were
> released yesterday with one (minor) known issue[2]. Sarge r4 should be
> coming Real Soon Now and should be fixed in that respect.
>
> Planned changes to the build system
> ===================================
>
> For historical reasons, the current build system is split into two
> parts, in different countries. Jigdo files are built on the first
> system, then transferred over and converted into ISO images on the
> distribution system. This works OK, but is a much slower process than
> we'd like. Plans are in motion to fix this performance issue by
> hosting a new build system physically adjacent to the distribution
> system; this should give a major reduction in the time we currently
> need to do a full CD/DVD run. It will also make it feasible for us to
> do some regular builds of CDs for some of the CDDs; Debian-Edu have
> already asked about this.
>
> Debian-CD development
> =====================
>
> Despite my grand ideas for debian-cd development proposed back at DC5
> in Helsinki[3], things have gone much more slowly than I
> hoped. debian-cd has been keeping up with the updates needed to do
> etch builds, but unfortunately many of the large structural changes I
> hoped for have not happened yet.
>
> The only big change I *still* hope to be possible for an etch release
> this year will be creation of multi-arch CDs and DVDs; my aim is to
> make an official 3-arch netinst CD (i386/amd64/ppc) that should boot
> and install from the network on all 3, and a single DVD image for
> those same 3 arches that should contain the equivalent of the first 3
> or 4 CDs, along with the sources to match. This latter should be an
> ideal disc to give away at expos and conferences, similar to the aim
> of the LinuxTag discs that have been produced over the last few
> years. I've started work on this already, and *hope* to be able to
> finish it soon.
>
> debian-images-generator
> =======================
>
> During this summer, I've also been mentoring a student in the Google
> Summer of Code. Carlos Parra Camargo has been working on
> debian-images-generator[4], a re-implementation of debian-cd written
> in python. His work is looking very promising so far, and once we have
> released etch I'm hoping to gradually shift over to using this new
> code.
>
> Help!
> =====
>
> We're looking for help on several fronts:
>
> 1. debian-cd has lots of small bugs that often don't get fixed
> because they're not a high priority.
>
> 2. TESTING! The daily and weekly builds already get some testing via
> the d-i team, but more is always welcome. Another place where
> more testing will help is in the stable point releases; it's very
> difficult to know with any certainty that a new build looks sane
> without access to lots of machines, spanning multiple
> architectures.
>
> 3. Lastly, another project I've been hoping to get going for a while
> is CD-lintian, an automated test tool to help ensure that
> generated images meet minimum quality standards. We already have
> lintian and linda available to help Debian maintainers check
> their packages for many of the possible common bugs; it'd be nice
> to have something similar at the CD level.
>
> On all of these points, volunteers are always welcome. Please sign up
> to the debian-cd mailing list or find us on #debian-cd on
> irc.debian.org.
>
> [1] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
> [2] http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r3/HEADER.html
> [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/07/msg00005.html
> [4] svn://svn.debian.org/svn/deb-imgs-gen/trunk
>
> --
> Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
> Is there anybody out there?
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