Re: Another installation report (quite long)
On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 01:05:48AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> I've spent today getting a Hurd system up and running under VMware [1],
> and I've had various problems along the way which I thought I'd share.
> I'm working on a P3-450 with 160Mb of RAM, 48Mb of which is currently
> allocated to the Hurd, and (luckily) IDE disks.
48 MB is enough, however, you must add a swap space, or the Hurd will be
less reliable (don't ask...).If you don't have a partition to spare (it can
be a linux swap, but obviously not the one you already use for the
underlying running linux), you can use a file on disk.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/gnu/swap bs=1024k count=64
And then, in /gnu/boot/servers.boot:
/dev/hd0s2/swap $(add-raw-paging-file)
That's all.
> (By the way, there's a bug in cross-install with respect to the current
> woody archive, as libreadlineg2 is now in oldlibs.)
Jupp, I will fix it now (it was reported a few days ago).
> The first thing I noticed was that, when I use Ctrl-Alt-Esc to get
> VMware to relinquish keyboard focus, or when I hit various other
> modifier-key combinations, I get one of the following errors on my Hurd
> console:
>
> kd_setleds1: unexpected state (1)
> kd_setleds1: unexpected state (2)
Seems to be a Mach thing. You could check the keyboard translation code.
(the Mach console and keyboard codes are a bit weird, and not complete.)
> hd02: bad access: block=28, count=2, blockend=30, nr_sects
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:02, sector 28
Harmless, although it would be nice to have it fixed.
> I tried to run native-install, anyway, and found that it invariably hung
> partway through for no well-determined reason.
Do you remember where?
> The fallback console
> doesn't seem to know about Ctrl-C (can this be fixed?),
I suspect it was already in a state where Ctrl-C didn't work. Or did you
verify that it does not work in general? (The fallback is identical to the
real console, it's just in an unusual place /tmp/console).
> so I'd no way of
> aborting and had to hard-reset the VMware box (which of course left my
> filesystem slightly corrupted, but I don't think it did any harm). The
> second time through it made it to the end,
I think native-install is idempotent. Someone could check this by reading
its code and let me know if he finds a problem with running it several
times.
> but I still have a sense of
> flakiness about the system - it's hung similarly once or twice apart
> from during the initial installation process, I had a "Computer bought
> the farm" during native-install once, and I'm getting the "default
> pager" errors which I've heard are a known problem.
The default pager means that you run out of memory. (Probably a leak
somewhere, but it also happens in unfortunate cases without swap).
> I had problems with ae, too; when I tried to edit /etc/hostname with it
> it refused to write it out with a trailing newline, which led to my
> login banner
Mmmh. I didn't see this before. However, ae sometimes shows a message "write
failed" while it succeeded. And don't use joe, btw. It corrupts files on the
Hurd.
> dpkg-deb: fgetpos failed
I suppose a bug/missing feature in the isofs translator. It is already
submitted as a regular report.
Thanks,
Marcus
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