Bug#3161: Newbie 1.1beta installation.
I just finished installing the 1.1 Beta and since it is beta I
thought I'd contribute what little I can with this description
of my experience while it's still fresh in my mind (I should have
taken notes).
First of all, I'm impressed at how complete the Debian installation
process is and how many packages are available. There seems to be
only a few rough edges left to polish.
I mirrored the Debian distribution from one of the mirror sites onto
a local machine yesterday and exported it for use in an NFS
installation. I made the floppies and booted and installed the base
system with no problem.
My first problem was that my 3c503 card was not recognized so dselect
couldn't find the NFS server (or talk to the net at all). Since I've
been running Slackware for a while and following the development of the
new kernels I guessed there might me a module in there somewhere that
needed loading. A novice would be stuck at this point since I didn't
find a menus option for selecting which modules to load. I found
/etc/modules and from the comments there it was obviously the file
to edit...
Second problem: The only editor available at this point was ae and
it was worthless. It looked like it should be easy to use with all
of that help info at the top describing what all of the function keys
don't do. That's right, none of them worked; not even the arrow keys.
I had to ^Z out and kill the job. I guess its a TERM/terminfo problem
of some kind but I didn't see what. TERM was linux and terminfo/l/linux
existed.
So to solve problem 1 I bypassed problem 2 by using sneakernet to
get /etc/modules on another machine and add a line "3c503.o" and
carried the file back and reloaded it.
Problem 3:
When I rebooted the machine I saw it try to load the 3c503 module
but it failed with a message about no dependancies found for
"/lib/modules/current/net/3c503.o". So I searched around and found
a modules.dep file. In it all of the pathnames use "1.3.95" instead
of "current". So I did the sneakernet thing again to edit this file
and change all of the paths. Now it finds the 3c503.o module and
networking works.
I now run dselect again and successfully get an NFS install started.
Durring the "select" I was kicked into the conflict resolution mode
several times. While in this mode I couldn't select/deselect the
displayed packages. I accepted what was presented and then changed
it if necessary back in the main menus. I didn't have this problem
a week ago when I installed on my experimental partinion on my machine
at home.
There were several dependancy problems and configure failures but
they don't seem to matter. This is where I wish I had taken notes
because I can't recall the details. I do remember that the pbm and
png libraries and some of the programs that depended on them had a real
big fight over what was going to actually get installed. But again,
lack of notes makes this part pretty useless to you.
Anyway... It's installed and functioning now. Mostly. I installed
the NIS as a client not realizing it would actually start durring
the installation. Since I don't have a NIS server for this set of
machines yet it was:
> repeatedly (continuously) broadcasting
> NIS DOMAIN_NONACK requests for domain "xxxx", distrupting NIS service
> center-wide
Network support partitioned it from the network. I killed the ypbind
processes as soon as I got this message and then removed NIS for now.
It should be back on the network tomorrow. :)
As I said at the start, I feel it all went fairly well for a beta.
I may install on a second machine soon. If I keep notes and the
developers think it will be usefull, I'll post again.
One note on a possible feature for the future. Since I will probably
be installing on 20 to 30 machines it would be nice to get one machine
installed and have dselect (or whatever) record what packages were
installed in a file. I could then copy that file onto the NFS server
I'm installing from. Then if dselect had an option to choose selections
from a file, repeated installations would almost be too easy.
Sorry if I sent this to the wrong list. I saw debian-devel and
debian-bugs and they seemed about the same so I picked one. :)
--
________________________________________________________________________
David M. Cooke d.m.cooke@larc.nasa.gov
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