Re: Sparc64 Install Problem
On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 05:28:02PM -0400, Bill Meahan wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 12:11:21 -0400
> philo vivero <phiviv@hacklab.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Instead, I booted with the "rescue" image which, for whatever reason,
> > did a normal install. Here's what I did:
> >
> > ok> boot cdrom
> > . . . blah blah blah . . .
> > SILO: rescue
> > . . . normal installation occurs here . . .
> >
> > > 5. The computer begins to boot, I see the normal Linux screen as it
> > > boots.
> > > 6. During boot a kernel panic occurs...
> > >
> > > Kernel panic: I have no root and I want to scream
> > > Press L1-A to return to the boot prom
I take it this is after the part of the install that takes place before
a reboot happens. One should always check silo.conf and such before
rebooting. It usually gets it right, but it doesn't hurt to check.
> I had exactly the same experience, also on an Ultra-1.
>
> Once installed via the "rescue" path, everything was fine. Of course, so
> much of the install just _assumes_ you're on a "PC"-like device with a
> video card and attached keyboard and mouse. My Ultra-1, however, was
> headless and I was using a serial console. I was able to find
> workarounds to the assumptions but that made it a lot more painful than
> it needed to be. Took me about 6 hours to get everything installed.
This is a long and rambling counterpoint to Bill's comparison of Debian
woody install to Solaris 9 install. Delete now if you don't care.
I haven't seen an u1 in a long while, and I haven't done an install
of Debian 3.0 for a month or so, but when I did, it was on a couple
of CP1500s (a USII based cPCI system popular with telco's) which has
video/keyboard/mouse hardware at all. In fact, it has two serial ports,
and HME port and a scsi port, that's all. Prior to that, I did an install
on my ultraEnterprise2 at home, and I have no Sun console stuff (no keybds
or monitors or whathaveyou), just an x86 computer, a serial cable, and
microcom (pathetically simple terminal emulator). Installs on all three
machines went quite smoothly, and I didn't notice anything bad that was
assuming that I was on a PC with a console. I didn't have the dreaded
"can't find vmlinuz64" problem, but maybe that's a more recent change.
Anyway, I agree with your [possibly deleted] notes on how hard writing
an install program is. I've done it. It's like hell. Every bastard
with a pencil neck wants progress meters, ways to do special weird
things that 99.99% of the customers won't ever want to do, you name it.
It's quite thankless and a butt load of work. Just to get it to work I
had to find and fix a bug in ksh (this was in the 80's -- don't ask).
> For comparison, I loaded Solaris 9 on the same machine and everything
> was smooth as silk. Very few "assumptions", good support (via
> "suninstall") for a serial console. Took me about an hour since once
> set-up for the install, the only required interaction was changing the
> CD's and I could walk away and do something else.
Wow, I installed Sol9 on one of the aforementioned CP1500s and it
was THE biggest pain. Not only did it suck, but it sucked worse than
installing sol8 with a serial console! That's impressive. Gone was any
attempt to do cursor addressing, and instead everything was done with the
moral equivalent of more(1) instead! Yikes! It was ... words fail me.
Yes, it's true, you no longer have to hit the F2 key a million times,
but holly scrolling 9600 baud terminal, batman, having to go through
I-forget-how-many hundreds of packages by scrolling and re-scrolling
and aagh. It was horrible. Took me hours. Imagine dselect, but w/o
cursor addressing: every time it wants to redraw the screen, it would
just scroll a screen full of lines up from the bottom. At 9600 baud.
You'd go completely mad after about an hour. But at least sol9 comes
with bash. ~:^)
Bottom line, AFAIC, the Debian 3.0 install was head-and-shoulders better
and easier than either the sol8 or sol9 installs.
> I understand _where_ the assumptions come from (given the history of
> Linux) and I'm not really complaining or faulting anyone but I truly
> believe more effort needs to be put into the installation process. No,
> I'm most assuredly NOT talking about a whiz-bang, themable, skinable
> all-singing, all-dancing GUI, I'm talking about a well-thought-through
> procedure that gathers all the necessary information up front so a busy
> sysadmin doesn't have to spend all day interacting with the installer.
> I'm also talking about CONFIRMING assumptions before they are acted
> upon. (Example: does the presence of a video card _really_ mean that the
> installer can go ahead and assume a video display or does it just mean
> the box came with one and it wasn't worth the trouble to remove it?)
Well, what you are possibly talking about isn't about PC assumptions at
all, I think. Once the packages are downloaded/copied, and they are
started to install, some of them have postinstall/configure scripts.
These are there to help you, and don't really have anything to do with
what hardware you're installing on. They can't be done while you're
having coffee after you've pushed the button and walked away, because
they come with the packages themselves. Possibly there should be a way
to have the procedure delay all those until every package has been
downloaded/copied and unpacked, but that would be hard because it's done
with a generalized package system that doesn't know you're doing some
kind of initial install.
The trick to doing fast debian installs is to install the minimum of
packages that you possibly can get away with, DON'T run tasksel, and
install what you want later. It goes pretty fast then and you don't
even get time for coffee. ~:^)
a
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