I burned a Dec 10 weekly Etch 1 of 15 CD to try the installer. Seems to work fine until we try the auto-partitioner. I had already prepared my 6 GB test drive with ext3 on hda1 and swap on hda2. Autopartitioner blew that away and replaced it with an LVM partition. Then it reported failure.
I booted knoppix and prepared the drive again. This time I said no to autopartition and it failed, explaining there is nothing mounted as /target. So I got a shell and made /target and mounted /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 there. Next it did not know where to look for install media. Since there was no helpful message about where the CD is supposed to appear, I installed the base system and GRUB over the network. At every step, the install menu wants to run that broken autopartitioner again. After rebooting, the base install works, except the apt-configure needs to be told the CD is /dev/hdc. I notice /etc/fstab is unconfigured here. During package selection, I have to repeatedly mount the CD; apt is not doing it automatically. Tasksel hangs and I give up on it. Apparently it doesn't know what to do when the things behind it fail. Apparently it traps signals so I have to kill it from the shell. Will use apt-get as usual. Don't give this release to a newbie, they'll be frustrated and go back to Windoze. This is about as generic a PC as you can find today. P4, APIC, SiS chip set, ATA drives, one per cable. Looks like hardware detection is hosed in the Dec 10 Etch snapshot, resulting in no /etc/fstab. If I knew which package that was I'd file a bug. Otherwise, the new base-config is a little nicer. Thanks, folks! Cameron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
