Re: failure in installation
> I tried to perform an installation of woody using
> boot-floppies-3.0.18 . I wanted to install via the network.
> However the following error prevented me from installing
> woody:
I had this error too :-(
> When attempting to install the base system, the following
> error message occured: ``Malformed Release file'', prefixed
> by the ftp site I was pointing to. Anyway, the error message
> appeared time and again. It appeared immediately after I pressed
> Enter at the previous screen, i.e., it did not actually attempt
> to bring the Release file. Moreover, when I (deliberately) disconnected
> the network cable, exactly the same message appeared.
I saw this too - it doesn't try to connect AFTER the first attempt. If
you get it wrong first it never tries again.
> I saw in a mailing list (don't remember which, sorry), that
> if one had network definitions problem, then there is no way out
> of this bug, but to re-install from the very beginning, including
I didn't do this :-)
I deleted a file (I can't remember the full path) but it was named
something like "malformed_release" and it was in the in the var/lib dpkg
path. I didn't make a note because at the time I was annoyed at the
struggle and the path did seem sort of logical. After deleting this
file, I simply did the usual download, entered the default path i.e. us
server though I would have preferred to use the UK server, and the
install went on from there.
When you do get it installed, it may not work then too. I got through the
install, I used dselect rather than tasksel and by default it installs
ssh and leaves telnet out. It also installs GPM. I just accepted
gpm's default configuration. GPM locked my machine solid, I couldn;t
ssh in because ssh installs broken - it asks for a password and it won't
accept the passwords for root or any other user and I couldn't telnet in.
The machine was still alive though because I could ping it. ALl I could
do was reboot the machine. At this point I didn't know it was GPM.
I rebooted single user and waited for fsck to finish (takes a long time
on a machine with 5 * 18GB SCSI drives). I then installed telnetd.
This doesn't work as installed. You need to add -L /bin/login to the
command line there's something broken with the telnet login program.
Once I could telnet in, I rebooted the machine again and it locked
the console solid. I then telnetted in :-), su'd to root and had a
look around. As I have seen problems with GPM before, I killed that
first and the console came back. As the install hadn't completed,
I was then presented with the "do you want to run tasksel", "dselect"
options again so I followed them through which basically allowed me to
configure exim (soon to be removed because I always compile my own)
and finish the install. I edited /etc/init.d/gpm and made the first
line an exit, I'm not using gpm yet so I'll sort that one out later.
Regards,
Dave
mail/debian/testing/2002-01-03.tx arielt@post.tau.ac.il
debian-testing
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