Package: installation-reports Version: netboot daily image from 2003-11-10 Severity: normal Tags: d-i
INSTALL REPORT Debian-installer-version: daily netboot image from <http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/images/2003-11-10/> uname -a: Linux (none) 2.4.22-1-386 #9 Sat Oct 4 14:30:39 EST 2003 i686 unknown Date: Tue Nov 11 01:03:47 EST 2003 Method: netboot via PXE Machine: Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop Processor: Intel Celeron 2GHz Memory: 256MB Root Device: N/A Root Size/partition table: N/A Output of lspci: /bin/sh: lspci: not found Base System Installation Checklist: Initial boot worked: [O] Configure network HW: [E] Config network: [ ] Detect CD: [ ] Load installer modules: [ ] Detect hard drives: [ ] Partition hard drives: [ ] Create file systems: [ ] Mount partitions: [ ] Install base system: [ ] Install boot loader: [ ] Reboot: [ ] [O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it Comments/Problems: Alright, here are the highlights of how this install went: 0) OK, after much struggling (and dealing with my nemesis error message 'VFS: Cannot open root device "" or 3a:04') I managed to get the d-i netboot image to work via PXE. For posterity (and the installation guide) the magic kernel options I needed to make this work are "ramdisk_size=8192 root=/dev/ram0". If anyone would like assistance setting up a PXE testbed or copies of various configs I use please don't hesitate to ask. 1) Install boots into the main menu. Interface looks alot snazzier than the old text interface, however the line-drawing characters are all messed up on my terminal (corners are displayed as '>', &c.) Known bug? 2) Picking "Choose language" doesn't get very far. This is what I can piece together from syslog: DEBUG: Menu item 'languagechooser' selected DEBUG: configure languagechooser, status: 4 WARNING **: Configuring 'languagechooser' failed with error code 1 WARNING **: Menu item 'languagechooser' failed. Any ideas? Known unfiled bug? File a new bug against languagechooser? 3) After doing 'Select a Keyboard Layout', I chose 'Detect network hardware'. This generated the following two (fatal looking) errors: a. An error occured while running 'modprobe -v floppy false`. b. An error occured while running 'modprobe -v ide-cd false`. Since this is a netboot install, these errors should not be fatal. 4) When finally presented with a list of ethernet drivers to pick from, the requisite driver for this laptop -- b44 -- is missing. I tried switching to vc2 and doing 'modprobe -v b44', but this fails since the module doesn't exist on the image. How do we get it added? Well, that's as far as I got. Hope this helps! Joe PS - This particular laptop doesn't have a serial port, so all output/error messages are hand-typed and subject to typos, &c. -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux laptop 2.4.22-1-686 #6 Sat Oct 4 14:09:08 EST 2003 i686 Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
