Sarge NetInstall latest build
Good day to all,
Here is a little report on the Sarge NetInst (I'm pretty sure I used
yesterday's build, 20040725) on HP Omnibook XE3. Kernel 2.6.7.
1. Even though I told it to use french language, french timezone and keymap,
it still used the US keymap. However the installer is made such that you
can't know this until after it's asked you for the root password. Result is
that you have to reverse engineer the password you actually typed in by
looking at a US layout... pain in the butt.
2. The ethernet adapter on this notebook is an Accton EN2242 miniPCI Fast
Ethernet Adapter that needs tulip. It seems to recognize this and it loads
tulip. Everything else works smooth up until reboot (except some of the
questions and things are randomly in english instead of french, but no
matter).
After reboot, it tries to get on the network and start downloading the useful
stuff, like emacs, vim, X, etc. Except I get this message over and over and
over, every couple of seconds
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
It cannot connect to the network. What is even more annoying is that when I
try to go to a shell and see what the problem is, look at a few configuration
files, etc, I don't have vim, so I can't edit them, and to get vim I have to
go to the network, and I don't have the network...
So I burn the first iso CDs and install a minimal graphical environment that
would allow me to figure out what's going on. I go through aptitude and
install as much stuff as I can without burning the whole 15 CD set or
whatever.
Aptitude is hell! It's atrocious. There are questions about apache and ssl and
php that I had to answer at least 4-5 times (??? wierd). I was actually
starting to feel a little insulted. [Besides I didn't even want to install
those, but it was three in the morning and I did not feel like going through
the package lists and picking them one by one. Never mind.]
Everything installs, I boot into the graphical system, and here's the punch
line.
Ethernet works without as much as a sneeze!!!
Tulip is loaded, network is configured, everything is just peachy. Which is an
indication that this is purely a problem of the installer, not of the driver
or of the network.
3. With the 2.4 kernel the installation works OK until you reboot, and it
hangs when trying to load tulip. Sorry I forgot exactly what the last lines
are, but it's something like
bla bla loading tulip bla bla
PCI bla bla IRQ 11 bla bla
and then it hangs.
So now I have what seems to be a functional 2.6.7 system, but there is much
much work still to be done. For one, all the X fonts are bitmap so I am stuck
with 10 point size cos anything bigger or smaller is pretty much unreadable.
etc etc But I think this might be because the type 1 fonts might be on one of
the other CDs which I did not burn. Also, the fonts are so sharp my eyes
hurt, and I don't know how to get them a little more rounded out.
Should I also post this to the debian-laptop list? I am brand new to Debian
(making the switch from Redhat for obvious reasons) so if I'm stepping on
toes, please don't flame me.
I hope somebody can do something about this stuff, especially the keyboard
stuff, and about aptitude. Is there some other package configuring and
installing tool in the works or is aptitude (uuoooogrhhhh, the noise Sideshow
Bob makes while rubbing Velma's feet) where it's gonna be for a while?
Alex Cabuz
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