Installation fizzer

John dingo at coco2.arach.net.au
Mon Nov 8 01:13:42 UTC 2004


System:
Athlon 1.4, Gigabyte GA-7S748-L  SiS 748 chipset. Inclides ATA, sound, 
LAN. No graphics on board.
nVidia TNT2 AGP graphics, 32 Mbytes.
New, clean Samsung 128 Gb
LG GSA-4120B DVD burner.
Big SunScreen that does 1600x1200:)

This system was previously running Sarge which got there witha mobo 
replacement.

I was installing from this, burned to CD on the rarget system.
-r--r--r--  1 548175872 Oct 20 07:35 warty-install-i386.iso


The CD booted fine, many times. Getting to the first menu was easy.

Every time (but the last) it locked up at that point. I could not change 
selection or accept the default.

When I specified the keyboard at the boot prompt, then that menu did not 
appear and the system simply locked.

I tried various options including turning off ACPI, LACPI, framebuffer 
and various values for VGA= to no avail.

Eventually, I used to BIOS to select fail-safe. The only thing that 
stands out as a relevant change here was to turn off sound: it also set 
an unacceptable boot sequence.

This time the boot succeeded and the installation proceeded as expected.

I had yet another nasty fight with the partitioner. I didn't want to 
dedicate the whole drive to U atm, so I chose to specify the partitions 
myself.

I don't find he tool as confusing as I used to, but I suspect that is 
because I've become more familir with it and not because it's actually 
improved a lot.


However, I do see some problems.
1. Warning about potential loss of data.
In this case, the warning is less than pointless: as I said above 
there's nothing on the drive to lose so nothing sensible to warn about.

    Even if there is data there, the decision to install linux has 
already been made. Instead, enumerate what is there;
Linux partitions
Non-windows partitions

It's probably not hard to identify some of these in more detail (Windows 
FAT, Windows NTFS) and maybe major Linux distroes.

Ask the user _what_ can be destroyed, what should be resized to make space.

This then is asking the user specifally what data is disposable.

If, after that, there is no space to install U....

2. Lack of sanity check.
I intended a 40 Gb partition, and so I specified a single partition size 
40. The partitioner accepted this as 40 Mb, formatted it, mounted and 
off we went.

3. The menus are littered with the wrong default reponses. These don't 
serve as useful sanity checks, they do frustrate the user, waste time an 
inure them to no read messages.

Better to accept all the responses offering the more probable values as 
defaults, and then provide a summary report when the user can read, the 
accept or decline.

Highlight any data that will be lost. If all space being allocated is 
from previously-free space then there really isn't any value in 
frightening the user with pointless warnings.


The next problem arose from 2. Instaling packages did no go well, and 
the installer diagnosed (how I don't know) a dud CD or network (network?).

Completely bogus of course. It actually ran out of disk space. Backing 
up allowed me to recover from the error, but the diagnosis would have 
confused the inexperienced (and many less inexperienced, it nearly had me).


 From this point things went fine; I created my admin account, made 
other decisions....

Then it came to starting GDM.

Oh oh. Those screen flashes don't look good.

Then there was a dialogue popped up.... I read the logs it offered me. 
NBG to a newcomer who'd not understand them. NBG to me, not enough 
information.

So there we are, no GDM. Just a console login. Which brings me to


Missing packages.
I use the console a lot. gpm is essential. It's not installed, it's not 
even on the CD.
ssh I need the server to get data from the broken U system to somewhere 
I can disseminate it. Fortunatly that is there.

root at Glider:/home/john # type -p gvim
root at Glider:/home/john #

My favourite editor is missing.

I note that cvs is in, subversion isn't. I'm at least as likely to need 
the latter.


Here's the problem with gdm:
summer at Glider:/etc/X11 $ grep -2 PCI XF86Config-4
         Identifier      "Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) SG86C202"
         Driver          "sis"
         BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

What's in that bus position?
summer at Glider:/etc/X11 $ lspci -s 1:0.0
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA 
TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] (rev 15)
summer at Glider:/etc/X11 $

Oh. What is the SG86C202?

summer at Glider:/etc/X11 $ lspci | grep SG86C202
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SG86C202
summer at Glider:/etc/X11 $



The X configuration looks easy to fix.



There is some good news:-))
Disk performances with this kernel seems right up there with the 2.4 
kernel I was using on Sarge:

root at Glider:/home/john # hdparm -t /dev/hda{,,}

/dev/hda:
  Timing buffered disk reads:  162 MB in  3.03 seconds =  53.53 MB/sec

/dev/hda:
  Timing buffered disk reads:  162 MB in  3.03 seconds =  53.49 MB/sec

/dev/hda:
  Timing buffered disk reads:  162 MB in  3.02 seconds =  53.65 MB/sec
root at Glider:/home/john #


Some will recall I was quite concerned about that. I wanted to go to 
2.6, but wouldn't sac 30% disk throughput for it.







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