Re: Installing sarge with etch installer?
On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 07:34:08AM +0100, Daniel Nilsson wrote:
> So what I was thinking about doing was to use the etch installer which
> has a 2.6.12 kernel in which I believe there is support for this SATA
> controller but then select to install the sarge distribution. Any
> ideas if this will work or not? I realize I will need to make sure I
> don't get the standard sarge kernel later on, but maybe I can select
> to use the kernel off the etch install CD? If not, I can always build
> a custom kernel later. My issue is rather running the installer in
> such a way that it will find the system disk off the SATA controller
> while installing sarge from scratch. Any other ideas on how to achieve
> this in most welcome. Netbooting is an option as well for example,
> would that help?
So I'm replying to my own message with the results of attempting to
install sarge using the etch installer. It "sort of" works, but I
didn't end up with the system that I wanted, here's a short
description what I did:
1. Setup a netbootable installer from from a current build of d-i.
2. Run the installer in "expert" mode and when prompted install the
stable distribution.
3. You will be prompted to select a 2.6.8 kernel since that is what is
available in testing but not what I wanted (I needed >=2.6.12). Select
any one of the 2.6.8 kernels anyway and complete the install.
4. When prompted to reboot, do not reboot but start a shell instead.
5. chroot /target and download the 2.6.12 kernel I wanted with
wget.
6. Mount the proc filesystem mount -t proc none /proc
7. Install the 2.6.12 kernel with a simple dpkg -i <kernel.deb>
What you end up with here is a system with all (?) stable packages but
that is still biased towards the testing distribution. It seems there
is something called pre-seeding (?) that will make the installer for
example put in testing sources into /etc/apt/sources.list. That's not
what I wanted, I wanted a pure stable system. Now this might be good
enough for someone else and then the above should work.
What I did instead was slightly more complicated... I used the sarge
installer, but replaced the kernel with the kernel from the latest
etch installer. This works fine up until the point where the installer
tries to download the kernel modules from the net, that will fail
since the stable distribution now doesn't have any modules for the
2.6.12 kernel you are running. At this point I started a shell,
downloaded from:
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/linux-kernel-di-i386-2.6/)
the corresponding 2.6.12 modules installed manually. Then you can go
back to the installer and finish the remaining steps. Again before
rebooting you will need to manually download and install the kernel
you want to use, steps 5,6,7 above.
Not an easy process, but I got the system I wanted :-) Just thought
I'd share in case someone else is thinking about doing something
similar, that path I took is probably not for a beginner though. There
might be easier ways to accomplish the same thing though?
/Daniel
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