I have tried with 20040528, from unstable.
1) aic7xxx issues.
According to section 2.1.1 of the Installation HOWTO,
If you have a SCSI CD drive and a relatively uncommon SCSI controller,
then you may also need one driver floppy to let the installer see your
CD drive. However, this is only the case with CD images that use
syslinux as their bootloader, rather than the normal ones, which use
isolinux.
Still, the initrd image on boot.img only has
/lib/modules/2.4.26-1-386/kernel/drivers/scsi/{scsi_mod.o,sd_mod.o}.
Which means that even the most popular SCSI controller will need one
driver floppy, isn't it?
I have tried to put the aic7xxx module in the initrd image and update
modules.dep. However I ran into a space limitation and could not
proceed.
As for specifying aic7xxx without any parameters, you are probably
right. I am using an initrd for a long time now. I think that in the
past this was a way to get the kernel to load a module at boot time but
I may be wrong. I couldn't find where such a thing is mentioned in
Debian installation manuals. Perhaps it never was.
2) serial console issues.
The following can be used as general guidelines in order to modify
the parameters that are passed to the kernel during boot. In particular,
one can use a similar procedure in order to boot automatically from a
boot floppy even though his machine requires manual intervention in
order to pass more parameters to the kernel.
In order to use a serial console, perhaps on machines without their
own monitor and keyboard, one can modify syslinux.cfg. This file is
located in the boot.img for those who use the floppies installations.
Some pointers about it are in the ldp's Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO,
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/configure-boot-loader-syslinux.html,
and http://syslinux.zytor.com/faq.php.
Some notes:
2.1) You might have to change the example to fit your settings. For
example, you might want to specify another serial port. Note that
in the example, the serial port is referred to as ttyS1 and as 1,
depending on whether syslinux or the kernel actually parse that
parameter.
2.2) A line of the form
serial 1 9600 0xab3
is intended for syslinux. It must be the first line of the file.
Further more, the 0xab3 term is for flow control. If you don't
have an appropriate cable or unsure what flow control is you
might want to drop the 0xab3 term.
2.3) With a serial console one has to press <Ctrl-F><digit> to get to
the help screens, e.g. <Ctrl-F><2> to get to the F2 screen, and
<Ctrl-F><0> for the F10 one.
As an example, suppose one wants to use the floppies installation method
over a serial console. He must get the boot.img and all the other floppy
images as explained else where in this manual. However before actually
writing the images, as root,
mount -t msdos boot.img /mnt -o loop
vi /mnt/syslinux.cfg
Within the editor (vi), append
debian-installer/frame-buffer=false console=tty0 console=ttyS1,9600n8
to the end of the append lines that are already there and
serial 1 9600 0xab3
as the 1st line. Save the file and exit the editor. Do verify
that the editor hasn't left a backup version of the file because
space is at premium in the floppy file system.
umount /mnt
And continue in writing the image to the floppy disks as explained else
where.
3) Recommends cmp whenever you mention dd.
As an aside, I believe that whenever the manual suggests to dd images
to a floppy device, that is, whenever something like
dd if=file.img of=/dev/fd0 ...
is suggested, it should also recommends to test the results with cmp:
cmp file.img /dev/fd0
. If cmp fails then sometimes repeating this procedure (dd + cmp) with
the _same_ floppy disk would make cmp succeeds, hopefully preventing an
attempt to use a bad image.
--
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then
you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I
have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two
ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw (sent by shaulk @ actcom . net . il)
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