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2.3.5 powerpc installation



I downloaded the 6/7 powerpc version of 2.3.5 from 

http://people.debian.org/~aph/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-powerpc/current/
powermac/

I completed an install on my newworld, up to installation of base, with no
show stoppers. The dhcp worked great, I verified I could ping on the net.
The new graphics are definitely an improvement! The expanded help text on
some items is also good.

Here are some opportunities:

During Install Operating System and Modules, I chose to install from an
already-mounted (HFS) hard disk filesystem. I mounted it thru the installer,
so it would know about it; but I got an immediate error after selecting that
option, when it would have ordinarily displayed my choices: Directory error;
the supplied directory does not exist, please enter a new one. The next box
allows entry of a path, in which I entered /target/instmnt/, and it went on
from there, finding the path to the system install package OK. (It would be
helpful to note in these manual path-entry boxes that the path must be
relative to / not /target. Or put another way, the path must begin with
/target/ for hard disks. Since stuff gets mounted under /target by the
installer, and it doesn't tell the user that, it's not immediately obvious
that the /target prefix is needed for paths.

The shell on tty2 could have the same intro text as appears when selecting
Execute A Shell.

In that shell intro text, nano-tiny --help, and a few other places, we refer
to 'nano' rather than 'nano-tiny'. Rather than fix all the different places,
and because it's easier to type, I think we should just add a hard link
named 'nano'.

In the shell intro text, we could note that arrow keys don't work, history
is not available, and there is no auto completion; just to remind people
that know and love those shell features (and also so they won't always be
reporting it as a bug). Also, rather than recommending a ls /bin /sbin etc,
I think a short help file listing the available commands and what they do in
the installer environment would be extremely helpful for people new to *nix
- but that's the subject of another post. The shell intro text could then
just say, "type 'help' for a list of available commands".

Still on the subject of the shell intro text, it briefly appears on the
console for some reason, after selecting Reboot the computer, but before it
actually reboots.

If we're running low on space, there are a few packages in root.bin that
probably aren't needed for powerpc: lilo, fdisk, cfdisk, mformat. Also
route, chgrp, rmmod could probably wait to be added during base
installation? I don't know what cardmgr is for.

One final note, I used mac-fdisk within the installer to split one of my
Linux partitions into two. Nice job on the new partition display, it's very
informative! Since my MacOS partitions are at the end of the disk as
recommended, when I rebooted (without changing yaboot.conf and rerunning
ybin), it looked like I had lost MacOS. Yaboot was trying to load MacOS from
my newly created Linux partition, because adding one in the middle
incremented all the higher partition numbers by one. All I had to do was go
back and fix yaboot.conf, but it made me wonder whether another check could
be done after running mac-fdisk: if the number of partitions changed during
the session, warn that yaboot.conf may need to be changed? The world is full
of dummies like me...

--

Chris Tillman
tillman@azstarnet.com



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