Trouble with installer

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 02:53:57PM -0500, aaron fay wrote:
> I am new to Linux and have had a devil of a time loading Ubuntu.  I am using
> a Vectra Pent III 933gHz with 512 RAM and 80gHD. I tried loading Dapper (
> 6.06.1) but the installer kept crashing.  I submitted the report to
> launchpad several times.  I did check the CD and it checked out fine on
> another machine.
> 
> Launchpad advised me to use 6.10 (Edgy).  I completely eliminated all
> partitions using Win95 startup floppy.  I burned Ubuntu 6.10 image on a CD
> yesterday and tried it, but the installer crashed again after about 15%
> installed.  Now I am at a complete loss what to do next.

This is https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ticket/3402, right? I'd
need the files that the crash dialog asks for (/var/log/syslog,
/var/log/installer/syslog, and /var/log/partman on Ubuntu 6.06.1; just
/var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman on Ubuntu 6.10) in order to
diagnose it; it's not clear from just the traceback why filesystem
creation might have failed, and I'd very much like to look into that.

Presumably you've rebooted since you tried this install, in which case
you'll need to go through the installation process again (and not reboot
when it crashes) to get the log files. An easy way to get those files to
somewhere I can read them would be to copy and paste them from a text
editor to a web site such as pastebin.com. Some of those files might
only be readable by the "root" user, in which case you'll need to run
'sudo gedit' from Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal in order to
get at their contents. (Don't do this in general just because somebody
asks you to, as files that are only readable by root may contain
sensitive information. However, since you're only starting the
installation, you're not going to have much of this. If you want to be
cautious, you can give the installer a password you don't care about
while reproducing this problem to make absolutely sure that your real
password can't appear in the log files.)

> I appreciate the advice and would also like to speak to someone by phone if
> anyone has the time.

Be aware that this is a publicly archived mailing list; it's not
necessarily a good idea to post your phone number on those these days,
although it's too late now.

In any case, I'm happy to call you if necessary on a weekday, although
UK to US calls are reasonably expensive so I'd rather do as much by
e-mail as possible, and in any case it would certainly be very tedious
to read all the necessary bits from the log files out over the phone.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]