hi I downloaded http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/i386/sarge-i386-netinst.iso from http://people.debian.org/~mbc/di.html a week ago; today I tried it.
I was trying to install sarge inside a big /scratch partition (no partitioning and no mkfs were needed) in a PC were I already have Debian. The PC is at home, where no network (decent) connection is available. Here is what happened (note: what follows is approximate, because I took brief paper sketches) -- I booted the the CD, allright, and were confronted with first menu, asking for langagues and keyboards; but, when I tried to change the kb, I saw the error 'segmentation fault kdb-choose's postinst exit statu 35584' then I went to "load installer modules" and I loaded console-keymaps-at then I said "go on" then it switched to a more complex menu I chose US keyboard. then "detect CDROM $ mount" then "detect network" -> and I found it impossible to do "go back" so I hitted "detect DHCP" and after a while ctrl-c then "load installer modules" -> "cdrom retrieval" then "detect hardware" then "configure partitions & mount" and I choosed a partition ( which is /scratch in my current Debian everyday life) as / ; but when I hit "finalize" I was confronted with a terrifing message, saying "will destroy all data you have assigned filesystems to" so I gave up so I went to the option "Mount/Umount (OLD)" and mounted it manually (and here again "go back" does not work) but then I could not understand which is the right way to install the base system from the CDROM I tried "mount the CDROM" and "choose a mirror" a few times, with no good effect: I was only given the choice of using an external network mirror a. --- Summary on the whole, I am missing a feature of the old boot-floppies menu: the menu would each time automatically select a sensible choice for the next task to be done; this is not the case with debian-installer; so the d-i seems a bit more difficult (and would probably be a bit scary for the lee-user); IMHO it would be important to have a "advanced mode" and a "basic mode", and , in "basic mode", only show the (very few) options that the user may most probably need to select at each given step of installation another thing that I noticed is that in many cases the option "go back" is not usable 3rd: the message "will destroy all data you have assigned filesystems to" is too scary, and should be replaced with something more informative such as "will destroy data in partition(s).... and will write data in partitions..." a. -- Andrea Mennucc "E' un mondo difficile. Che vita intensa!" (Tonino Carotone)
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