Hi, I've just attempted a debian-installer installation on an i386 system with no CDROM drive, using Etherboot. I admittedly used an outdated version of Debian installer (the "beta 1" announced about a month ago), so I apologise if some or all of these problems have already been noticed and fixed.
The machine had a standard IDE hard drive, NSC Geode CPU, 128MB RAM, and Realtek 8139 networking. - Throughout the installer, the line-drawing characters looked a bit messed up. (using "^" for horizontal lines, ">" for corner bits) - The keyboard layout selection is confusing. It first asked me for a keymap for a USB keyboard - but I wasn't using a USB keyboard, and all of the options it gave me were for the Mac, and for some reason it defaulted to British English. It then took me back to the menu. After selecting "Select a Keyboard Layout" /again/, it asked me whether I was using a PC or USB keyboard, defaulting to USB; I chose PC. Why was it necessary to ask this, and why was I prompted to choose a keyboard layout twice? Finally, it gave me a selection for a PC-style keyboard layouts. - It didn't succeed in loading all the modules it wanted to; the culprit appears to be "ide-cd". - There was no way to specify where it downloaded the debian installer modules from, or to tell it to use a proxy server. - It kept wanting to find a CD drive; there wasn't one, so it couldn't. Selecting "No" when it asked whether you wanted to configure a CD did nothing. Selecting "Yes" and then "No" when it asked about non-IDE non-SCSI CDs took me back to the menu. Surely a network installation should be able to work properly without a CD? - After choosing to partition the drive, I got the modules error again. Other than that, partitioning with cfdisk seemed to work. Mounting filesystems likewise seemed to work. I wasn't told exactly which partitions were going to be mkfs'ed in the final warning - it would be nice to have that final confirmation list the partitions it was going to wipe. - The keyboard navigation for "Go Back"/"Yes"/"No" choices was a bit weird - it seemed as though the installer thought that "Go Back" was on the right hand side, not the left. Cheers, Cameron. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
