some comments about the potato installation system
I'm putting in a few comments here since the Installation Manual is
still so out of date. BTW, we are correcting this in an ongoing
fashion; newer versions of the manual are being updated for
boot-floppies 2.2.17, but can also be found at
http://www.debian.org/releases/potato/ .
Be aware that we are still finding and fixing problems in the Potato
boot-floppies. The woody effort has branched off under the guidance
of Joey Hess; there is another little group including me who are still
working on the Potato documentation and bug fixes. (Thanks especially
to Joey aka Martin Schulze who is doing a marvellous job going through
the bug list.)
First off, there are some new boot arguments that aren't well
documented which might be very useful to folks. On i386, press f7.txt
to see them.
Notable is the 'quiet' option, which suppresses a lot of confirmation
messages ("are you sure?" type stuff) as well as trying to go ahead
and do the right thing when it seems right rather than asking. This
is helpful if you are doing a lot of installations but aren't quite
ready for an auto-installer.
Another notable option is 'debug', which is good if you are reporting
a bug against boot-floppies. This creates extra logging to tty3,
which can also be found in /var/log/messages during installation, or
/var/log/installer.log after installation.
If you are submitting a bug report, it's always appreciated to have
the installer.log file. If you are in the midst of installing and
have no network or base system yet, one way to copy it over is to tar
it to a floppy.
Finally, if you are in i386, I really suggest you start off with the
'compact' flavor of disks (images-1.44/compact) on SCSI machines, or
'idepci' (images-1.44/idepci) on IDE machines. These include kernels
which are much more reasonable on modern systems than the "compatable
with everything" standard kernel, and only have one driver disk a
piece (downside is no sound modules).
Anyhow, have fun out there and be sure to report problems as bugs
against boot-floppies (or kernel problems as bugs against whatever
kernel-image-* package the disk set you have uses). We are listening.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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