Re: Problems installing hurd on i386
On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 02:34:23AM +0000, Philip Charles wrote:
> Marcus,
> I was doing all my work in the Debian installation shell and I
> found that the tarball was mounted on /gnu/ not / so I modified it. The
> modified tarball behaves in the same way as base2_2.gz so the modified
> tarball now replaces base2_2 and is installed very nicely on / with the
> "Install the Base System" option in the installation menu.
We have a communication problem here. I am not sure what you mean with
"mounting a tarball". What I do know is mounting the root partition, and
extracting the tar file (eg, which path is stored in the tar file).
Can you please clarify what you said?
> On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> 1. "mount" in the tarball does not seem to like iso9660 file systems and
> so the CD-ROM cannot be read.
The Hurd doesn't have a mount syscall, and so mount is just a wrapper of the
more general settrans utility, which installs translators. Check
www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-doc-translator for an introduction into
translators. You should definitely read and understand it for the things you
do.
> 2. "dselect" is the old slink version and has problems with the potato
> non-US file layout.
Use ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/debian/* dpkg packages, please.
> The work-around for the iso9660 problem
settrans /cdrom /hurd/isofs /dev/hd1
> was to copy the packages onto the
> HURD partition while in the installation shell. The problem here was
> that cp in the shell copied what the symlinks points to .... and there
> is a circular symlink .....
You should know about the -a option to cp. (cp -a foo/ /bar).
Which cp in which shell do you mean?
BTW, there must not be symlinks in the path to the packages you give to
dselect if you want the CD to work. The isofs translator in the Hurd is
broken and will not parse symlinks correctly.
> When I used dselect (without non-US) it did some work then fell over
> because of unmet dependencies. However "joe" (my favorite editor)
> installed nicely with dpkg.
joe is broken on the Hurd. Don't use it. You will get file corruption in
saved files. Use vi or emacs (or fix joe). jed is also ok.
All dependency issues are solved when using the packages at
alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/debian and creating a newer tar file.
> I did all this on a machine with only one partition, HURD (didn't bother
> with swap even) and no network connection.
You must use swap, or the Hurd will easily crash. With 48 MB RAM, the Hurd
crashes soon after the dselect run to install all standard packages. SO, for
most people, swap is absolutely mandatory and for everyoine it's a good
idea. Every install documents should mention that adding swap increases
stability significantly, even if you think you have enough memory (that's an
effect hard to describe, but believe me that 32 RAM/+32 swap is more stable
then 64 RAM without swap).
> What I would like to do in a week or two's time is to start to butcher
> boot-floppies. There is a very useful development path here
>
> 1. The HURD partition could be formatted with a menu item (no more
> typos!!)
Menu items? You mean in boot floppies?
> 2. Redundant menu items could be removed.
There are some things the Hurd doesn't support. Those have to be removed
also.
Note that debian-boot is currently completely reworking boot-floppies for
woody. Could you consider working on that, taking care that it will work on
the Hurd?
> 3. Put a more useful version of cp in the ram-disk.
I think it's better to solve the real problem.
> 4. Modify documentation.
> 5. A series of base floppies could be generated so that HURD could be
> installed by floppies only (does anyone do this any more?).
I had some work done in this direction. We need one boot disk and two root
disks, and there are a couple of hurdities you don't know about. I will take
a look at it again, but there is a show stopper right now:
0. port fdisk to the Hurd, which should get the disk geometry from a yet to
be written interface in libstore.
Without fdisk, ...
> The beauty of the Debian packaging and installation systems is that they
> are quite generic, even M$ could use them. I see my role as adapting the
> installation system to install HURD rather than hacking HURD itself.
It's great that somebody picks this up. This was one of my goals, too, but I
pushed this further away because there are a couple of stones on the road I
am not interested in pushing away. I am happy to help with the root and boot
disks, as I already did them some time before (for example, I wrote the
mklibs.sh script used in the current boot-floppies to create the minimal
shared libs, and I originally wrote it for the Hurd).
Well, till later.
Marcus
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