[7689] in testers
rocky road to Athena 10 install [long]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Fri Sep 12 19:18:07 2008
Message-Id: <200809122317.m8CNHIdH019035@dit.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:17:18 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
I'm not doing so well trying to install Athena 10.
In both install attempts described below, I chose workstation and "install
everything" (Athena development -> y, Install cluster packages -> y).
I've decided to give up on the first machine I reported here
yesterday, my Averatec laptop, because I believe the machine is
physically broken beyond whatever problems it's having with the Athena
10 installer (CD drive works erratically, I usually can't get it to
boot off a known good boot CD now). For the record, after the freezeup
I reported yesterday, I followed jdreed's suggestion to delete
debathena-cluster-software and rerun the installer. It was able to
complete, and I got to an Athena 10 login screen. I logged in but then
the screen went uniformly tan, with no keyboard response. Mouse
movement moved the cursor but nothing else happened. After some time
(maybe 3-5 min.) I gave up and rebooted, but got the same thing on
subsequent login.
Today I tried on a standard cluster-configuration 745. I first did a
fresh Ubuntu 8.04 install (replacing the prior RHEL5 installation),
which proceeded normally, except that when it completed I was unable
to reboot. The reboot activity initiated, I saw some very quick
console messages flash by with what looked like errors related to hal
but I didn't really have time to read them. It then went to a screen
with a Ubuntu logo and progress bar which emptied, at which point
nothing changed. No keyboard response, all I could do was power cycle
it. When it restarted things seemed OK but this behavior has persisted
through my attempts to install Athena 10. I hadn't changed any BIOS
settings since the machine was delivered and installed (with RHEL5).
On to the Athena 10 installer- I started it as per instructions
(http://athena10.mit.edu). It ran for a fair while and completed. No
obvious error messages at the end, except for an alert to a broken
package in the installer applet (Error: BrokenCount >0). Running
package-manager told me libpurple0 was to blame. I ran it with the
"fix" option for that package and that seemed to make the error go
away. Logging out and back in didn't give me an Athena 10 login screen
but rather the usual Ubuntu one. At that point I wan't sure what state
the install was in so I ran the installer again. Again it completed-
some errors flashed by but I didn't have time to read them. Afterward,
the update alert icon then told me that about 90 updates were ready,
but that I could only do a partial update due to problems with some
packages. I told it to do the partial update. This is when major
problems became evident. I was getting various crash report icon
alerts, but clicking to get more information as it advised just made
the icon go away with no further details. The update stopped on
zephyr-clients, asking for entry of a zephyr server. Since I didn't
know what to enter I clicked "continue" and that aborted the
zephyr-client install. It then told me that about 15 packages couldn't
be installed due to missing prerequisites, and ended with "could not
install the upgrades, your system could be in an unusable
state. Recovery will run now with dpkg --configure -a". An alert icon
told me that an apt-file update was needed, but I was unable to
install this even though I followed the instructions for doing
it. Things basically stopped there, it seems to be running standard
Ubuntu with whatever broken pieces of the install are there.
I'm leaving things as they are, to be continued next week. The machine
is pavane.mit.edu, the leftmost machine in the lower-level N42 test
cluster area. I'd be interested to know if anyone has successfully
installed Athena 10 on a 745, and if so, if you did anything different
to make it work.
Alex
