Gaudenz Steinlin wrote: > Am Die, den 11.11.2003 schrieb Joe Nahmias um 09:16: > > > 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. > It would be nice, if you could write a short addition to the > INSTALLATION-HOWTO about your way to install d-i via PXE boot. There is > already a very short section on netbooting the installer. If you send a > patch to debian-boot, I will look at it and commit it to CVS.
This was already requested (hi tbm!) and sent to the BTS and the debian-testing list (where the request originated). I titled the message "How to create a PXE d-i netboot testbed in 10 easy steps" (MSG-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>). Please look at it in one of these places. > > 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? > not know bug, please file one. Sorry I don't know which package to blame > for that. Any takers on where I should file the bug? slang? > btw the installation should not boot into main-menu but directly go into > languagechooser. That probably happened b/c of the next problem :) > > 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? > > > bug not know. You should have languagechooser 1.03 on your image, which > is the same as on the beta1 which works for most people. Please file a > bug. Yes, the image contains version 1.03. I will file a bug. > > 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. > please file a bug on hw-detect (or ethdetect?). It's strange that these > are tried for network hardware detection. Probably the installer tries > to load additional modules from a floppy? I really don't know why it's happening. I will file a bug on hw-detect. > > 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? > known bug. As of linux-kernel-di 0.12 this driver is in > nic-extra-modules. This means you have to load it from an additional > floppy. If this is a common NIC then we could add it to nic-modules, > which is on the netboot initrd. I believe it is a common NIC and it is used on all of the newer Dell Laptops. For the netboot images, why don't we include nic-extra-modules?? Wouldn't this make sense to do since we know that a network install is being attempted? It's not like we're trying to cram stuff onto a floppy here, so why not put all the network modules we have into this image? > > PS - This particular laptop doesn't have a serial port, so all > > output/error messages are hand-typed and subject to typos, &c. > You could try to save /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog to an > already formatted partition. Unfortunately, I don't have a partition available that I can write to from linux, and fdisk isn't available yet to create one. Thanks for the help! Joe
