Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

I installed from 0.9.4-i486-2.6.9-nptl-test2.iso

This was a relatively pleasant experience, most of my comments are just
nit-picky interface issues with the installer, only a few things went
majorly wrong. Im sure some of the comments below have already been made,
but i'll repeat them so I remember to check for them on future isos.


At bootup saw some weird error messages (approximating, they went by
quickly and i apologize if i missed part of the message):
VFS cant find ext3 fs on dev loop0
VFS cant find ext3 fs on dev loop1

Then later:
modprobe FATAL inserting shpchp 
/lib/modules/2.6.9/kernel/drivers/pci/hotplug/shpchp.ko) operation not 
permited
This also came up on the native system, not sure why its there, no biggy,
just a little weird.

I went to mount my partitions, chose /dev/hda2 and jfs, then got a dialog 
message asking if I wanted to format the partition or not:

"Would you like to initialize /dev/hda2 using the following command..." 
The dialog uses "asis" as one word, i think its "as-is" or "as is".

My bios battery had died so the clock was at 1997, I got lots of tar
warnings about things being in the future. Not a big deal, just annoying
and fairly easy to fix, but it'd be easy to check if the time is too
far behind and set it to a date after the iso was built so i dont see
the warnings.

Heres a one-liner:
if [ $(date "+%Y%d%m") -lt $ISO_DATE ] ; then date -s "..." ; fi

Obviously ISO_DATE should be some value hardcoded into a file during
iso generation with "date "+%Y%d%m"", and the date -s format is a little
more complicated, but can also be generated and stuffed in a file.


"spell foo version bar is being investigated" 
what does this mean? why do i need to see this? I assume this is
debugging code?

Installs glibc-kernel-version and glibc 20041122
Hopefully the next iso will have glibc 2.3.4 and no glibc-kernel-headers

Some other messages, probably also debugging, but disconcerting:
"spell is already installed"

"spell  is missing" (why is there empty space?)

Architecture dialog:
"optimisation" (should be optimization)

Also it drops into root sorcery menu, should go directly into architecture
menu.

gnupg is installed with the kernel (cool!!)

May want to also install sorcery-pubkeys on future isos, this should
probably become part of basesystem soon too...

installing lilo got an error:
Fatal: APPEND or LITERAL may not contain "vga=", screen was cleared very
quickly, I had to try several times to actually see the message...this
makes it hard to see whats wrong and fix it when im editting the config.

I chose to edit lilo config, got some strange dialog about smgl
installing to the first sector of /boot, which wasnt true since in the
previous menu I said to install to the mbr. The lilo.conf file was
generated with boot=/dev/hda as I had requested and contrary to the
previous dialog.

lilo config was loaded again after I left the editor, it should probably
just run it once at the end of the dialog rather than before the menu
about editting lilo.conf and then again after i finish editting it.

network config: got menu question about creating /etc/sysconfig/network,
the installer should probably just make this before running netconf or
whatever. I dont need to see that question, as a user I have no idea
what it means.

driver menu: get a lot of things that arent drivers for network devices
(ip_nat_ftp) this is confusing, probably a netconf issue not and
installer issue.

"Sorcery is gathering the optional spell menu" I dont think sorcery is
doing this (last i checked it was a loop around gaze), and also the
menu shouldnt need generating, it should be pre-built during the iso
generation process, the delay is unnecessary. You can make a flat file
like this:
spell:version:short description
and read the values that way instead of repeated calls to gaze.

menu isnt wide enough, no way to see the whole description (maybe there
could be another button to get help that shows gaze what $spell), things
that are already installed show up unselected, this is confusing. They either 
shouldnt be on the menu, or should be 

why is glib on the iso, does something depend on it that I dont see?

Device menu:
no choice for devfs :-( Yet its in the iso kernel.

Why is there one menu entry for choosing /dev AND setting root password,
why not seperate?

mountnetwork should not be enabled by default (smgl-default-remote-fs does
this), it also needs nfs stuff to start anyway and it wouldnt work. I
dont think it should be on the iso to begin with.

/etc/sysconfig/facilities:
remote_fs=smgl-metalogsmglmetalog
should be "remote_fs=smgl-metalog" it may have gotten this way because
I went into the configure logging menu twice and selected metalog
both times.

There is a hanging /old.libaries symlink into a perl subdir for some
unknown reason.
no need for /var/state/sorcery/depends.backup
missing /var/state/sorcery/triggers, it should exist even if its empty,
sorcery complains if its not there.

evms was installed for no obvious reason
gdbm is an orphan and appears to have no useful purpose, I didnt select
it to be installed either.
netkit-ping and netkit-base are arguably not needed
pcmcia rp-pppoe wireless_tools and dhcpcd were installed even though i didnt
request them, for network config i said ethernet, then no to dhcpcd,
pcmcia and wireless_tools.

"Done" menu entry then asks if I want to reboot now, If I say no it
jumps to the top of the installer, why not just have a reboot menu item?

lilo didnt actually install in the mbr (due to errors above). I tried to
use the rescue function from initrd:

I tried to mount /dev/hda2 from the menu and got a generic dialog back
about it failing with no indication of why. Turns out the initrd was
devfs which is a bit disconcerting when I just chose udev in the
installer, and there wasn't even a devfs option, it was the last thing
I expected. I choose the devfs style of hda2 and choose "continue booting"

I used jfs for my root fs..
mountall.sh errors about mounting /dev/hda2 read-only line 95: /etc/mtab
readonly, I chose to ignore that error, more errors came up, eventually
mountall failed and let me log in to repair things, i was not able to
mount -o remount -rw /, maybe thats a jfs thing i donno, i mounted root
on /mnt editted lilo.conf, reran lilo and rebooted. Not exactly the
rescue functionality I expected, but it worked.

Aliens directories in /etc:
default/
pam.d/
both empty, I didnt install pam either...the linux-pam spell should just
mkdir /etc/pam.d if its missing.

sourcemage_version says 0.9.4 no information about the iso, eg: test2 or nptl.
On the second line "installed" could be uppercased

no kernel source tree in /usr/src

/ is mounted with noatime by default.


Everything else seemed okay, I'll try a cleanse --nofix and a sorcery
system-update and report on how that went once its done.

Over-all I was very impressed. Good work!

-Andrew