I built d-i on a stable powerpc machine, first installing the build dependencies (in build/control) from sid.
libpopt0 (needed for pump-udeb) also needed to be upgraded to sid, the stable version was insufficient. (I'm not sure if it should become a bulid dependency as a result.) I completed the build for powerpc, of course there is no hope for floppies with our 2.4 kernel: Total system 1.9M (964k libs) Initrd 720k Kernel 3236k Next I tried make demo, keep in mind that I have no idea what I'm doing here; if my comments are ignorable, please do so ... For the first make demo, I got Cannot open template file /var/lib/cdebconf/templates.dat However, that file was there when I executed a shell immediately afterward. It must be created there after its absence is first detected. Perhaps wait to report the error until the fix is tried? The opening statement for the shell mentions nano, but nano is not actually present. Is there even a pager? I didn't know how to check the contents of templates.dat. I finally grepped it for Name: and saw modules for anna, debconf, debian-installer, di-utils-shell, mirror and netcfg. What is the proper command to exit the shell and re-enter the main menu? I typed exit in the shell and the demo stopped. Next I tried DHCP config. It detected a tunl0 interface, but admitted it was an unknown interface. It gave me a choice between that and eth0, Shouldn't eth0 be defaulted? The subst netcfg/confirm_dhcp hostname returned an error: 20 incorrect number of arguments I suspect it just needs a <none>. Next I'm asked if the interface, hostname, domain, nameservers, and dhcp_hostname are correct. I answered no, because only the interface was correct (the rest were blank/<none>, and I was bounced back to the interface question. I guess, if only the interface has been chosen, as happens when using dhcp, then only the interface should be in the confirmation list. Then I would have answered yes, which takes me to the next step. pump was successful initializing eth0. On my machine, I get 3 messages from eth0 spewing after the Prompt: 1-4> line has already been displayed, telling me that the link is up. This would be confusing to some; is there some way to delay the prompt until after eth0 has had its say? After choosing the retriever (choice 1 of 1), I tried to choose modules. The menu kept coming back whenever I typed a number, leading me to believe that nothing was being accomplished. I'd suggest a line just before the prompt listing Chosen: numbers as a feedback for the user. Detect hard drives also gave no feedback as to whether it was successful or not, but the menu default was changed to Automatically Partition (unsafe) (default). IMHO this should not ever become default. After selecting Partition a hard disk and acknowledging the ide drive (choice 1 of 1), I got an error from di-utils-partitioner.postinst: 51: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: Permission denied postinst exited with status 32256 I suspect this is due to my disk being a mac-format disk, probably the partitioner for powerpc doesn't exist yet. Skipping the partition and filesystem steps, the installer helpfully warns that I haven't done those, yet gives me the option to say I already did them. This is a nice touch, I think. di-utils-mount-partitions/which-partition PARTITIOMS also fails with an incorrect number of arguments, postinst exited with status 5120. Again, this code is probably trying to read my Mac partition table as if it was an i386 one. All in all, very impressive so far. It builds and works smoothly and quickly. We just need some powerpc disk guru to help a little in order to go any further on powerpc. -- "The way the Romans made sure their bridges worked is what we should do with software engineers. They put the designer under the bridge, and then they marched over it." -- Lawrence Bernstein, Discover, Feb 2003 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
