Hi everyone, now that I'm subscribed to this list, and tried out D-I on kFreeBSD (r60026), I want to inform you about some issues I experienced.
ISSUES in Debian Installer
==========================
D-I: [netcfg] manual network configuration fails
------------------------------------------------
I don't know why, but manually configuring the network fails.
D-I: [grub-installer] fails
----------------------------
grub-installer in the menu fails, I don't know why. You can install
grub-pc in /target and run grub-install there to get a bootable
system.
D-I: [partman] Should use slices
---------------------------------
FreeBSD uses slices which contain multiple partitions. The
first partition being /, the second one being swap by default.
Debian installer should support slices just like it supports
extended partitions. It should by default create one slice and
the partitions inside this slice and not on the disk directly.
D-I: [parted] parted_devices crashes
[parman] Does not list partitions
---------------------------
parted_devices crashes if the device contains UFS volumes
outside of a slice. This causes partman to not list any
partitions at all.
This also means that you can't reinstall GNU/kFreeBSD at the
moment, because it lists no partitions the second time.
D-I: Changes keyboard layout
----------------------------
D-I seems to confuse the system in a way that pressing 'a' on
the keyboard gives 'q' (and others).
Issues in the installed system
================================
Installed: keyboard layouts missing
------------------------------------
There appears to be no way to use a keyboard layout different
than the standard US one.
Installed: Problems with localizations
----------------------------------------
Localized messages display wrong characters for non-ASCII
characters.
Installed: Filesystem of /proc should be procfs
-------------------------------------
The filesystem of /proc should be procfs and not linprocfs in
order to be compatible to FreeBSD. linprocfs only emulates parts
of a Linux 2.4 procfs and is not really useful. This is needed
e.g. to get kbuild working, as it calls readlink() on
/proc/curproc/file which is only available on procfs.
If this gets changed, /sys should maybe be dropped to, and both
linux compatibility FS should be mounted somewhere in e.g.
/var/lib/linux (i.e. /var/lib/linux/{sys,proc}).
Other Stuff
===========
VirtualBox 3.0 on GNU/kFreeBSD
-------------------------------
I'd like to have VirtualBox one GNU/kFreeBSD, as upstream already
has support for FreeBSD. This will require changes to the kbuild
package and the virtualbox-ose package. I have not talked to the
maintainers yet, but I would take care of writing the patches.
I already installed an IDE (Geany) on my kFreeBSD VM, so I can
code on this. I will prepare the needed patches, send them to the
BTS and will inform you once I'm finished.
--
Julian Andres Klode - Free Software Developer
Debian Developer - Contributing Member of SPI
Ubuntu Member - Fellow of FSFE
Website: http://jak-linux.org/ XMPP: juli...@jabber.org
Debian: http://www.debian.org/ SPI: http://www.spi-inc.org/
Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/ FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org/
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