It is my second week after having started with debian. I wanted to taste what's it is like to have a 'stable' system running...
Anyway it's anything but stable but i'm still fighting. I have also wondered from the very beginning, after having carefully swallowed the install.html, how im heaven can poeple go on with the first very important tool broken: cfdisk. A big warning was there about my last chance to backup/ first to sweep out my disk. I had already partitioned the 3.1MB of the fireball, so i needed only to change the type of a partition to swap. But the install menu wanted then to patition the whole disk again. Ok, i had to make it without swap. Some days later i found my way to bug report system, for which i can only express my respect. If only the maintainers would do respectively serious work. I found the answer there but don't know yet how to put it in the packaging system. Sometime last November was a hint to repair the bug in cfdisk: Subject: Re: Bug#5466: cfdisk is broken for disks >4GB Solution: just as for fdisk: On every call to ext2_llseek, cast the sector number to ext2_loff_t And then: Fixed in 2.5-8. So i found the fix in util-linux_2.5-8.diff.gz and util-linux_2.5-9.diff.gz which are what i have found to be the latest rex-fixed release. in file cfdsik.c: void read_sector(char *buffer, int sect_num) { - if (ext2_llseek(fd, sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE, SEEK_SET) < 0) + if (ext2_llseek(fd, (ext2_loff_t)(sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE), SEEK_SET) < 0) and void write_sector(char *buffer, int sect_num) { - if (ext2_llseek(fd, sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE, SEEK_SET) < 0) + if (ext2_llseek(fd, (ext2_loff_t)(sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE), SEEK_SET) < 0) fatal(BAD_SEEK); Of course for the cast it is too late: the first suggestion was meaning : (ext2_loff_t)sect_num*SECTOR_SIZE Well, i mean cfdisk is not a tooly. cfdisk should have been exaustively checked before released. Together with some other similar missings, this broke my hope i could rely on the famous rocky solid debian. RedHat has aldready lost my confidence. So i see i shall keep on with my own hybrid installations (old good slackware, sigh :( ). For the end, i have a lot of respect and thank for all the guys out there, neverthe- less i would like to remind that ten thousands of innocent users out there are also a part of the process. ... Stelios Parnassidis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kapuzinerstr. 8, 80337 Muenchen, Germany, Tel. +49-089-7211505