Re: No HFS driver, and "change install priority" menu option missing -- and other bugs found while testing 2.4 boot floppies on OldWorld PowerMac
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 05:05:58PM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
> Package: installation-reports
>
> In addition to the already noted problems with 2.4 PowerPC boot
> floppies, I have two requests for modules to be included on the
> root or root-2:
Ok, actually following up on this from Oldenbourg with an oldworld box on
hand.
> 1) The "change installation priority" menu item should be available
> *very* early in the install process. Best would be immediately
> after loading the root-2. Currently, it is not available up thru
> partitioning, at least.
Hehe. Well, this is a general thingy. The idea is to change this in the kernel
command line with DEBCONF_PRIORITY=medium or low. Maybe i should create an
'expert' boot/boot-ofonly floppy set ?
> 2) The "hfs" and "hfsplus" (MacOS filesystem formats) filesystem
> modules should be available early on. This would make it much
> easier to save log files to a floppy or a zip disk. Also, they are
> *required* for support of booting with BootX, so that the kernel
> and initrd can be copied from /target/boot/ to the appropriate
> place on the MacOS partition prior to the reboot.
Yeah, but you have to balance the usefullness of that together with the size
limit of the floppies.
> For the sake of completeness, here's a list of the other things
> I've found that currently don't work about the 2.4 powermac boot
> floppies:
>
> 3) Country chooser is called before loading root-2, so it hangs
> trying to do a "grep US" on a file that is on root-2, but should be
> on root.
I moved the iso-3166-udeb package to root againt, should fix this.
> 4) the "ofonlyboot" floppy never switches to text-mode screen. It
> reads and ejects the boot floppy. But, since the text mode screen
> never appears, it's impossible to proceed further. This happens on
> both my test machines, the beige G3 tower, and the 6500.
Well, i have the impression that this is not a real problem, but a feature,
well sort of.
There is two cases, either the real fbdev driver (valkyrie here) will work, in
which case you use the boot floppy, or it will not. The same goes for the
ofonly. Either the offb framebuffer device will work, in this case you can
chose to use the boot-ofonly floppy, or it will not. If neither offb or the
real fbdev device will work, you are screwed anyway, not much d-i can do here,
and the only solution is to fix/port/write the driver in the kernel.
> 5) It never finds my disk. It gets all the way to partitioner
> without loading either the "mesh" driver or the driver for my PCI
> IDE controller card.
This is a problem. Probably linked with the trouble with more than one floppy
disk. Theroetically it should be loaded from the net afterward.
> For the record, I do not have any of these problems with installing
> via BootX using the latest businesscard CD. Of course, for
> problems 3 and 4 this is a trivial statement.
Because all the modules are in the initrd, or at least those you need, and
afteward the rest is brought trough the network.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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