[20415] in Athena Bugs
rhlinux installer experience
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Wed Jun 26 05:09:57 2002
Message-Id: <200206260909.FAA08309@stratton-two-ninety-one.mit.edu>
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 05:09:54 -0400
From: "Jacob Morzinski" <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Hello,
The rhlinux installer in /mit/bookit was able to install my
laptop, so I'm in general satisfied with it. It still required a
fairly high level of linux knowledge on my part to get things
working; I'm writing up a summary of issues that occurred to me
as I was using it.
Points 3-7 are relatively minor, and are also difficult to resolve.
I think points 0-2 are more major, but are also easier to fix.
0) I had a difficult time locating an install disk that had
drivers for my pcmcia network card. The installer claims to
support a "driver disk", but I couldn't find a driver disk
that was actually recognized when I inserted it at the
appropriate stage. If the installer does indeed support a
driver disk, it would be convenient for its image to be in the
same directory as the installer's image.
1) When I first ran the installer, I stopped and started at the
"DESTROYS DESTROYS DESTROYS" screen, afraid to proceed.
Nothing on that screen suggested that it was safe to continue
onwards.
I appreciate that you could have some nostalgia for that
particular warning message, but I suggest either toning down
the message, or providing a disclaimer that users will be able
to protect their hard disk if they choose a custom install.
2) The custom option lets users set up partitions by hand. It
does not, however, tell users what its expectations are. If
the installer will want the disk to have root, cache, and swap
partitions, it should inform the user of its requirements.
3) The current installer still requires the linux partition to
start below the 1024th cylinder. It may be a good idea to
tell the user this before letting them set up their partitions.
(It would be even nicer if the installer let users mount their
own partitions, like a small low-located /boot, so that lilo
could safely install the boot loader...)
4) During the install, I noticed that sshd was installed with a
key of "root@localhost.localdomain". I don't know sshd well
enough to know if this could be a problem; I just wanted to
point it out.
5) For some reason, after the install finished and my laptop
rebooted, it came up with pcmcia turned off. (PCMCIA=no, a
blank PCIC=, and wrong PCIC_OPTS in /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia).
It would be nice if pcmcia came up properly configured.
(I saved the bad file and can send both the original wrong
file and my current correct file to you if you're interested.)
6) During the install, the installer told me that it failed to
auto-configure my X installation. So, upon reboot, I booted
into runlevel 3 -- and received the unhelpful
"Type CTRL-ALT-F7 to log in."
message. The inittab was still in cluster configuration,
disallowing logins in the virtual ttys. I believe many
private workstation owners will want to enable the virtual
ttys. I can't think of any easy way for you to figure out
what sort of inittab the end user wants, but I thought I'd at
least mention the issue.
In closing, I'm glad the installer works. (Yay! Yay! an
installer that isn't embarrasingly out-of-date!)
-Jake
