With the assistance of some local debian developers I made a few further tests. This is also relevant to bugs 220529, 247704. The three bugs should probably be merged.
I tested with Official netinst i386 of 20040528, http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/sarge_d-i/i386/20040528/sarge-i386-netin st.iso md5 = 2d1e2248b19a23aa5d90624fb15395fa I was testing on a Dell Latitude CPiA A366XT, with bios version A01, the same hardware as in bug 247704. As before, the symlinks in /cdrom/dists did not work, causing installation to fail. The cd was tested in other laptops and the symlinks work, so the disc itself is not at fault. This suggests a problem specific to the ide controller in these laptops, possibly a crappy bios problem. I don't know how to narrow it down further. There may however be things that could be done to improve the behaviour of debian-installer in such cases. The tests I made were as follows boot command result ------------ ------ linux fails at "load installer components from cd" linux hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false fails as above linux noapic nolapic fails as above linux debian-installer/probe/usb=false fails as above linux aic7xxx=no_probe fails as above linux append="hdc=noprobe hdc=cdrom" fails as above linux26 fails as above expert fails as above In 'expert' mode I deselected all the IDE chipset drivers except piix and generic. Also left in ide-detect,ide-disk,ide-cd,isofs,floppy. The cdrom is not detected (ie the contents of .disk/info file are shown) But it still fails at the "load installer components from cd" step. For booting with 'linux' I discovered a workaround, which is to <F2> umount /cdrom mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /cdrom ls -la /cdrom/dists (shows symlinks correctly) If I then go back to the installer <F1> and try that step again (ie hit the [Retry] button on the installer screen, it works.) This applies to both 'linux' and 'expert' boots. However I then hit a critical bug: On the installer console I get Debootstrap Error Failed getting Release file /cdrom/dists//Release Notice the double /. The syslog shows base-installer: error: exiting on error base-installer/debootstrap/error/nogetrel This is occuring because the $SUITE variable is not set by the time the installer hits /usr/lib/debootstrap/functions. I am not sure of the exact reason why this happens. Poking around took me on the following adventures: 1. I saw in /var/lib/dpkg/info/cdrom-detect.postinst that it sets $suite, not $SUITE, and this is not exported to the enviroment. It looks like $SUITE is set in /var/lib/dpkg/base-installer.postinst but I don't grok the call that does it: if db_get mirror/suite && [ "$RET" ] ; then SUITE=$RET fi The failure I see in the installer dialog seems to be from this line: cp /cdrom/dists/$SUITE/Release $APTLISTDIR/tmp || \ nogetrel="/cdrom/dists/$SUITE/Release 2. By this time I had successfully partitioned the hard disk. I tried to copy the cdrom contents to one of the partitions, and remount that as /cdrom. This failed with the same error, $SUITE not getting set. I even went back to the partitioning step and fiddled with the partitioning to try to get base-installer to work. 3. I hacked /usr/lib/prebaseconfig.d/90prepare-base-config to force SUITE="testing", but it failed with the same error. I realised that I should have hacked /var/lib/dpkg/info/base-installer.postinst. This seemed to give a little more progress; the error message about the Release file went away and I was left with: An installation step failed. You can try to run the failing item again from the menu or skip it and try something else. The failing step is : Install the base system. 4. For some reason the /target/root directory was not being created, so /target/root/dbootstrap_settings was not created. It appears the value of SUITE is stored there. So I created it, and still had no luck. the file is getting updated, but it contains the line SUITE="" grr. 5. I tried debootstrapping myself. debootstrap --verbose sarge /target /cdrom I: Retrieving debootstrap.invalid_dists_sarge_Release E: unknown location /cdrom/dists/sarge/Release grrrrrrrrrrrrr. I couldn't find information about where an appropriate basedebs.tar would lurk so I gave up here. Summary: [bug?] In my particular case, something is failing to determine correctly the value of SUITE from the netinst cdrom, during cdrom-detect. [bug?] As far as I can tell, something is omitting to create /target/root. /usr/lib/prebaseconfig.d/90prepare-base-config then fails to create /target/root/dbootstrap_settings. This has the flow-on effect of causing SUITE to not be set correctly when base-installer runs (the value to use is stored in /target/root/dbootstrap_settings). base-installer then fails. Miserably. [bug?] If it matters, /target/boot is not created either. Is that a bug in partman? (see partitioning below). Extra info: this is the partitioning scheme. hda1 / 148 Mb hda5 /usr 3000 Mb hda6 /var 512 Mb hda7 /home 2000 Mb hda9 /data 13800 Mb (i.e. remainder of the disk) hda8 swap 512 Mb [bug?] There is definitely some kind of problem with symlink handling in the packages used for the sarge installer. When I did this cp -r /cdrom /target/data the /cdrom/debian symlink, which points to '.' was copied very many times, until I got a "too many levels of symbolic links" error. In /target/data, I had /target/data/cdrom/debian/debian/debian/.... /dists/sarge If it matters, the number of 'debian' subdirs was 40. Cheers Vince -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
