Installing Slink - I
Hi,
I am trying to install Slink and here is a preliminary report :
My machine is an Aptiva S90, and because of its peculiar hardware
design, I have found that my previous Linux installs (Redhat and Hamm)
have not detect my cdrom drive on my third (primary) ide interface. I
always have to specify the I/O port addresses and IRQ's on the boot
cmdline for detection to take place correctly. Slink was no exception in
this regard.
Here are some of my observations from the install :
- Initially, when I was booting from cdrom, I did see some errors flash
by. This was probably related to my cdrom drive. But I cant verify this
because the messages were instantly replaced by the graphical install
screen. I think that if there are errors, the install process should at
least pause so that the error messages can be read.
And yes, I went to a second console (F2) and looked at dmesg, but
no error message showed up. Of course, not all the messages that I see
during the boot process show up in dmesg, since dmesg only logs kernel
messages.
- Partitioning using cfdisk does present an opportunity to confuse
newbies. It did confuse me a bit, and I am not a newbie. When I requested
cfdisk to set the filesystem type of my partition to 'Linux extended', it
refused saying 'Illegal command'. The default partition was of type
'Linux'. I later on figured out that the 'Linux' filesystem type was for
ext2, and 'Linux extended' was for ext (I guess), even though, from the
descriptions, one would expect it to be the other way around.
- A device /dev/hde had not been created. When I tried to install Debian
from the cdrom (which is /dev/hde), despite the fact that (after I booted
with the correct I/O addr and IRQ assignments for /dev/hde - which is the
cdrom drive), the kernel had correctly detected the device, the install
program was unable to mount the cdrom because of this. I had to manually
invoke 'mknod' to create the device before the install could proceed.
- In the section for configuring Networking, the options for configuring
as part of a local network and for connecting to a remote network via
dialup are presented as mutually exclusive. This is simply not true. In my
case, I maintain a local network, and the machine I am installing Slink
on, is part of the network. This machine, however, also has a dialup link
to my ISP.
- At various points in the install, the install keeps failing because the
mount of the install media (the cdrom) fails because the device has
already been mounted correctly. I feel this should be corrected. Either
umount the cdrom each time a process has finished using it for some part
of the install, or improve the intelligence of the installer. Perhaps the
check should be for whether a certain directory is accessible, rather than
trying to (blindly) remount the install media.
- A suggestion : When the boot disk is created, is it not possible to
store the current kernel cmdline so that the boot process will start up
with all the modifications required?
- A biggie : After I had created my boot disk and rebooted my system for
the first time via the bootdisk, I discovered that the /dev/hde device
which I had previously created was gone. This is probably because my
previous creation was recorded in RAM, and this was not written to disk.
This is definitely not nice.
Regards,
Jor-el
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