Debian vs. Debian vs. Debian vs. Debian
I've had only frustrating experiences with Debians in the past, but I
decided to give some a try again. I set up a K6/2 550 on MVP4 with 256M,
TNT2 16M, and 40 GB HD to install as follows:
hda3 78M /boot for hda7 root
hda6 384M swap
hda7 4.8G for Debian Etch /
hda14 2.7G for Knoppix 4.0.2 /
hda15 1.6G for /home
hda16 5G for /pub
hda17 300M for /srv
hda18 1.1G for /usr/local
hda19 3G for Xandros 3.0.2 OCE /
hda20 2.4G for Kubuntu 5.10 /
Other partitions are home to OS/2 and windoze. hda2 is IBM Boot Manager.
Doze and OS/2 were installed first (and both run without apparent
hardware problems), then Knoppix, then Etch, then Xandros, then Kubuntu.
I put Debians boot loader on hda3, Knoppix's on its /, Xandros's on its
/, and Kubuntu's on its /, and set each to start from IBM's BM.
Etch is the only install that went without major glitches, though it
certainly could have gone better. I asked for the graphical desktop, but
got no choice to prefer KDE over Gnome, and had to wait for all those
unwanted packages to install, then wait again to apt-get install kde,
which still left me with no xdm installed, and no mc with which to
figure out why. Luckly mc was readily available to apt-get. I thought
that since there was apparently no separate kdm package at
http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/pool/main/k/ that it was included and
that I was simply missing some proper config. Since overcoming these
hassles all but two things seem OK, about which one below. The other: it
ignores my BIOS NUM state (turning it off though it always finds it on).
There's only one keyboard connected to the PS/2 port, and it should
always reflect the same state, regardless whether in X or some tty.
Knoppix from CD seemed to run just fine, but after running
knoppix-installer, Knoppix from HD hasn't worked too well. It doesn't
seem smart enough not to keep every kernel module it ever heard of from
staying loaded (Etch also has way too many lines to fit on screen at
once in /proc/modules, 3543 bytes in Etch). After several hours uptime,
it slows to a crawl with "out of memory", though seems OK until then.
Both 'init 6' and 'shutdown -r now' fail to reboot the system, leaving
me looking at a "Rebooting..." message until I push a button. I have yet
to figure out how to get portmap to start automatically on boot. Its Sys
V editor has a totally baffling UI. Same problem as Etch with NUM.
Xandros' installer seemed to work perfectly, but I have yet to make the
installation boot. Loading Lilo on hda19 directly from BM, the screen
shortly goes black and stays that way unless I select the last of the
three boot options. Choosing the last (expert), it displays loading
messages for a while, but never gets past 'Recovering nvi editor
sessions... done.' CAD does restart it, and it does seem functional by
chrooting from some other boot. If I chroot on Knoppix boot and try to
run lilo, I get 'Fatal: raid_setup: stat("/dev/hda19")', and no output
from 'fdisk -l /dev/hda'.
I later tried adding the Xandros kernel and initrd to a new section to
menu.lst on hda3, but when I choose it I get a kernel panic with "VFS:
Cannot open root device "hda19" or unknown-block(0,0) Please append a
correct "root=" boot option", even though the menu.lst section is
configured like the sections for Debian, Knoppix & Kubuntu all work just
fine. ATM this kernel line in menu.lst is '/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda19
1 splash=0 vga=ask' following 'root (hd0,18)'. I have succeeded in
installing to 2 other machines previously from the same CD, so I really
don't know what to try next.
After each failed attempt to start Xandros I try to go back to Etch to
try to find and fix whatever the problem is. Each of those reboots turns
into two reboots, as somehow hda7 gets set with a superblock future last
mount time, and has to ro fsck in maintenance mode and then reboot after
it's done if I want normal operation. During install, I selected
hardware clock is set to local time, not to universal time. In Etch
maintenance mode the shell can't find mc.
Kubuntu's first installation stage seemed to go OK, but late during it
asked if I wanted to copy additional packages to my conservatively sized
/ and I answered no, thinking it would be smart enough to ask to have
the CD reinserted after restart and get them from there directly in
order to proceed. Apparently this was an unacceptable answer, as on
restart the installer picked up at 0% and just stayed there. On other
ttys things were functional, and I could see with top that apt-get was
using 99% CPU. I tried killing it, but it always restarted to 99%. Since
I couldn't figure out how to fix whatever wasn't working, I started the
install from the beginning and this time let it waste that 400M of HD
space needlessly copying packages off the CD.
As with every other [*]ubuntu install I've tried, the ttys are fubar.
Always 'update-rc.d -f hotkey-setup remove' fixes it, but that's
apparently not possible before the installation is entirely finished,
including a reboot. Even after that fix, mc doesn't work right. Its
display on the ttys is subject to character shifting so that you're
rarely exactly sure where you're looking at valid display and where
you're seeing corruption. As it happens, until the Knoppix and Debian
installs above, I'd never done any kind of debian install and not had
troublesome video on the ttys. Kubuntu also has the same NUM problem as
the others above.
All constructive ideas & suggestions welcome.
--
"Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord." Psalm 33:12 NIV
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/
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