Hello!
On 6/13/19 5:12 AM, user...@yahoo.com wrote:
> I was able to install a text-only installation on the Centris 650 using
> the serial console ("console=ttyS0,9600n8"). It's not necessary to hit
> "1"; the installation screen eventually comes up.
>
> Here are a few observations and comments:
>
> 1) Approximate times were as follows:
> a) 30 min - from initial setup to prompting of a Debian mirror.
> b) 4 hrs - from start of scan of Debian mirror to "popcon" prompt.
> c) 5 hrs - from "popcon" prompt to completion of loading packages.
> d) 3 hrs - from selection of "openssh server" and "system utilities"
> to completion of installation.
Nothing unusual on an 68040 machine clocked at 25 MHz.
> 2) After installation, the system was rebooted after a prompt. A
> question mark appeared on the main screen. Booting from an external
> disk, Mac OS volumes could be mounted manually using "Disk Utility", but
> they were still not seen after a reboot. The problem was fixed by
> running "Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5p" and updating the Apple driver on the
> affected disk. So it seems likely that something in the installation
> corrupted the Apple driver.
Yes. As mentioned in another part of the thread, Debian's parted package
needs to be updated to include a patch which fixes this problem. It's
a bug in parted and will eventually be fixed in Debian.
> 3) Booting into the new Linux installation using a 5.x kernel, the
> kernel crashed after not finding a valid init. As it turns out, if a
> separate /usr is specified during the installation, then the system
> won't boot, because /usr won't be mounted yet and the following
> directories are symbolic links:
>
> /bin -> usr/bin
> /lib -> usr/lib
> /sbin -> usr/sbin
>
> I realize that most users will probably just use a single filesystem for
> everything, but there have always been compelling reasons to use
> separate root and usr partitions. At any rate, if it doesn't work to
> specify separate partitions, then the installer should warn about that
> (or maybe have a "Root & Usr" partition option like NetBSD does and then
> not allow specification of a separate /usr partition).
Separate /usr hasn't been fully supported throughout the Linux world for
a very long time.
See this explanation, for example:
https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
This is also not something I am going to work on because it's a fundamental
decision the Linux world has made years ago and changing this would mean
having to fight a futile fight.
Please note that the Debian packages and debian-installer are not customized
for Debian/m68k. Everything you get is stock Debian and thus anything that is
not supported in stock Debian is also not supported by Debian/m68k. This
includes such invasive changes such as a separate /usr.
> 4) After booting into a backup partition (Debian 3.1) and backing up "/"
> and "/usr" from the new installation, and then restoring everything to a
> single "/" filesystem, the new system booted using the kernel (and
> initrd) that were created during the installation.
>
> 5) The system never reached multiuser mode; the startup sequence looped
> on "Starting Network Time Synchronization" (see attached console log
> "Centris_650-Debian_10.txt"). The systemd timeout for this task was 1
> min 30 sec, but it never succeeded within that limit (I let it try 10
> times before forcing a reboot). I'll try other things, including single
> user mode and checking whether I can increase the limit somehow, or
> possibly disable network time synchronization temporarily.
You need to pass "emergency", see:
https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Debugging/
Please note that a lot of BSD and Unix knowledge from the 90s no longer
applies to modern systems running systemd, so there is no init runlevel
for single-user mode (it's called emergency target).
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
