Package: installation-reports Version: N/A Severity: wishlist INSTALL REPORT
Debian-installer-version: http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/local-di-sarge.iso 20021207 uname -a: Linux localhost 2.4.19-386 #1 Sun Oct 6 17:23:00 EST 2002 i686 GNU/Linux Date: 20021209 22:30 AEST Method: Burnt CD from ISO using Easy CD Creator, and booted successfully. Installed from CD. Machine: Mongrel white box. Processor: AMD Duron 1200 Memory: 256Mb DDR Root Device: 40Gb Seagate IDE ST340824A Root Size/partition table: /dev/hda1 1 319 2562336 83 Linux / /dev/hda2 320 352 265072+ 82 Linux Swap /dev/hda3 353 512 1285200 83 Linux /var /dev/hda4 513 4865 34965472+ 83 Linux /home Output of lspci: (numeric as I'm copying these over manually) 0600 1022:700e r14 0604 1022:700f 0601 1106:0686 r40 0101 1106:0571 r06 0c03 1106:3038 r1a 0c03 1106:3038 r1a 0c05 1106:3057 r40 0401 1106:3058 r50 0200 10b7:9200 r74 0300 10de:002d r15 Base System Installation Checklist: Initial boot worked: [O] Configure network HW: [E] PEBCAC? Config network: [E] PEBCAC? Detect CD: [O] Load installer modules: [E] PEBCAC? Detect hard drives: [O] Partition hard drives: [O] Create file systems: [O] Mount partitions: [O] Install base system: [O] Install boot loader: [E] Reboot: [E] [O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it Comments/Problems: - I noticed some errors along the way, including: Cannot open template file /var/lib/cdebconf/templates.dat Debian Installer Main Menu <snip> Prompt: 1 - 4> (critital, high, medium, low) rmdir: unable to remove '/usr/share/discover': Directory not empty ATAPI-CD ROM-DRIVE-52MAX Linux IDE-SCSI emulation layer kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k nls_iso8859-1, errno = 2 kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k nls_cp437, errno = 2 - There was no default retriever so I had to answer a question that probably didn't need answering. - Had some trouble getting the network installation going (specifically, detecting card and installing module) but think that was PEBCAC. It's late and I'm tired. Thought I had an eepro100 but it was a 3c59x. I think it may have been broken anyway as I did try auto detection but got modprobe errors which I suspect is because the relevant low priority package hadn't been installed. - Tried to install GRUB, but without success: Installing GRUB failed: chroot: cannot execute /sbin/grub-install: No such file or directory - Finished the installation and reboot failed: mkdir: Cannot create directory '/target/var/log/debian-installer': No such file or directory postinst exited with status 256 - No post installation happened, and as such there was no root password, etc. This is probably to be expected given the alpha status. - fstab was broken, lacking header line(s), readable formatting (with spaces/tabs), and most importantly, cdrom, devfs, proc, etc. lines (which broke a bunch of startup scripts). - Feature Requests: There were some questions I had to answer that could have had sensible defaults, including cdrom-retriever and low priority packages. Minimising the number of times we hassle the user should probably be prioritised. Some sort of template driven auto partitioning, even if only / + swap, so people can at least try debian without having to understand partitioning. Lacking XFS support. I still use ext3 usually, but I'd like to try something new, and XFS looks like a good place to start. Any other candidates? PCMCIA looks broken. It's probably meant to be. There were some errors on startup. I will, more often than I would like, want to mount a partition as an afterthought. Usually it's /var. I'll then have to reboot to single user, mount it manually, move the relevant files over, and remount it where it's meant to be. fstab hacking is occasionally required too. This process could presumably be automated during installation. Being able to automate this process somewhat from the installer would be nice for live systems too... ie I've just installed a new hard drive, and want to mount it as /home, but need to copy everything over first. Where better to do it but from the installer? Automated Installations would be *really* handy. I'd love to see these implemented in time for sarge... I figure this is already fairly well mapped out and would involve some answers for installation questions, possibly a partition template (sfdisk?), a list of packages and some reasonably sane way of giving debconf the right answers and making it quiet. Storing this information somewhere other than the CD (did I hear something about http?) and allowing config to be specified (by DHCP option?) for each machine would really make my day. Is this being discussed somewhere? Has it already been discussed? Implemented?
