Hi all. Great work with debian-installer; it has progressed quite a bit since I last tested it a month or so ago.
I've downloaded the October 5 netinst image from http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/netinst/i386/ and run through it a few times on my laptop. For the most part things went smoothly. The first problems relate mostly to mobile systems. I had to do a bit of work to get my PCMCIA network card to work. It was all possible without having to drop to the console on tty2, but it certainly wasn't right. Early in the installation, d-i reported that no network interfaces were available. To fix that, I chose the main menu option to start PCMCIA services. Following that, my interface was still not present. I selected the main-menu interface to probe network hardware and load the appropriate modules. Here, I selected the option for "other" module, which prompted me for a full path to a network card driver. I left this option blank, which resulted in errors (because modprobe isn't happy if you give it "" as a module to load!) This, however, worked, and my network interface came to life. From here, I was able to successfully configure it with DHCP. However, the wireless-tools package was not installed as part of the installation system. This made it impossible to set the wireless network name (SSID), meaning that my machine would connect to either my neighbors network or my network, depending on some kind of RF conditions or something. Ideally, d-i would show a list of available wireless networks, allowing the user to choose one. Assuming that's not likely to happen, the user still needs to be able to manually set a network name. An additional problem came when creating filesystems. ext3 could be created with no problems, but reiserfs wanted input on tty3. I suspect that this is because I was trying to install on a partition where there had previously been an ext3 filesystem, and it wanted to make sure it was OK to blow this filesystem away. I don't know if there's an option that one can pass to the reiserfs creation tool to prevent it from asking this, or if source code changes will need to be made, but something should be done here. It certainly didn't fail in a clean way, and basically resulted in a hung installation. The final problem was that for some reason d-i asked if I was sure that I wanted to automatically partition my hard disk after I had already manually partitioned it, configured filesystems, and installed the base system. It did this just before the step where it asked me to choose a kernel to install. Naturally I told it I didn't want to automatically partition the hard drive, and it seemed satisfied... Hmm.... One more problem. The installation system seems to have completed, but it didn't install the PCMCIA modules. So even though I used the PCMCIA NIC to successfully access the network during the installation process and the pcmcia-cs package was installed, I was not able to do so one the machine rebooted. '/etc/init.d/pcmcia start' resulted in "modules directory /lib/modules/2.4.22-1-386/pcmcia not found" I figure some of this problems are known already, but if not, please feel free to contact me if you need more details or want me to test a potential fix. noah
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