Bug#2341: Install problems
From: dhs@firefly.com (David H. Silber)
> I intended to load up the current Debian 1.1 candidate, but what I
> got from unstable/disks-i386/* was the 0.93 installation set.
I'm currently building the 1.1 floppy set. One doesn't exist until I'm
done. Tonight I'm working on building a chopped-down shared C library
so that I can fit more on the floppy. I haven't communicated to anyone
that there was a 1.1 floppy set - I guess you just assumed one was there.
> Since floppy_merge ignores interrupts
Huh? I just looked at the code and there is nothing touching signals.
It might be that the interrupt character of the tty is set wrong or
that the shell script is changing how interrupts are handled and that
is being inherited. Is it just hanging or is floppy-merge saying something?
> When I ran: floppy_merge /dev/fd0 | gunzip | cpio --extract -v
> manually, it seemed to be more successful than when I restarted
> the load from the installation menu.
How much memory on that system? Is it a 386 by chance?
There seems to be a timing problem with the floppy driver that hits
386 systems. There might be something in fdutils that tunes it.
> On both installation attempts, when I rebooted with the custom boot
> disk, fsck found a corrupted file system (the one & only on that
> machine) and automatically corrected it. Are we unmounting the
> file system(s) when we reboot? Are we running sync?
I think this might be related to your problem above. Are you sure it's
floppy reads going wrong and not hard disk writes?
> I could build a boot floppy with elf enabled on my main system, but not
> everyone has that option.
Don't worry, that will be taken care of.
> An attempt at an elf-only installation set.
On the way.
> A network installation option.
I can probably replace the 3 base disks with FTP. I have not tried
this yet, and it's going to require moving around some of the set-up
stuff.
> Also, there are removable-media SCSI drives.
Yes, it would be simple enough to make that work.
> A second virtual console.
Tiny init just got bigger. I'll look at it - it probably won't add more
than a few hundred bytes.
> Floppy_merge should not ignore interrupts. If the interrupt
> that it does not mask is not ^C, then the user should be
> informed as to haw to break out of it.
Is it prompting you for disks you don't have, or just hanging?
If it's hanging, it's in the kernel.
> Fix whatever is causing fsck to complain when the system is
> booted for the first time.
That hasn't happened here. What kind of error is it?
Bruce
--
Bruce Perens <Bruce@Pixar.com>
Pixar Animation Studios - Reality is not our business.
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