Over the past few days, I have been trying to install Linux-Mandrake
7.1 so that I can contribute to the distribution. Since I don't have
a Mandrake CD (at least not yet), I've been trying to do it via FTP or
HTTP over my high-speed cable connection to the Internet. I've had a
lot of trouble getting it installed, and I thought I'd repot what I've
experienced. I'm using an IBM ThinkPad laptop with a D-Link PCMCIA
Ethernet card, if that makes any difference.
First I tried the text-based installer in automatic mode. It set up
the Linux partitions for me inside my extended partition, which
already had a FAT32 partition. My only problem with that part of the
installer was that it changed my Win95 extended partition to a Linux
extended partition, thereby making my D: drive invisible to Windows
until I corrected the problem in fdisk. But when it came to
installing packages, the process was going slowly and I thought maybe
I had picked a bad mirror site to download from. So I thought I'd try
the installer in customized mode, so I could have more control over
what went on my system and try another mirror at the same time.
Actually, I tried the installation in expert mode, and I had picked
"Development" when asked what the system would be used for. I got a
segmentation fault somewhere in there, but I can't remember where. I
noticed that you use plain fdisk for partitioning in a text-based
custom installation. I think cfdisk would be better, mostly because
it lets you specify the partition size in kilobytes instead of having
to deal with cylinders.
So I tried a text-mode custom (not expert) installation and told it
that my system was for "Normal" use (knowing that that would probably
be wrong, but I could fix that later). This time I got through a lot
of the installation. However, near the beginning of the package
installation, it reported an error (probably a network-related
problem) and gave me a chance to re-select my package groups and pick
up where it left off. As I watched it download and install all of the
packages, I wished I could select individual packages or smaller
groups of packages, because it was installing a lot of stuff I didn't
want. Then the pACkage installation stopped before it had installed
everything, and the installer tried to move on, but it was missing the
time zone info and that was the end of that attempt.
I tried the custom installation again, this time selecting fewer
package groups (figuring I could install packages by hand with the
good old rpm utility later on). I got an error a little under halfway
through the package installation, and again it gave me a chance to
reselect my packages and try again. But it still stopped short of
completion, as it did before.
Then I tried the custom installation and told it that the system was
for "Development" use, and I got a segmentation fault after the
package group selection.
Finally, I concluded that the text installation wasn't as polished as
the graphical installation, so I tried the graphical mode. I used the
low resolution ("vgalo" at the boot prompt), since I'm visually
impaired and the lower resolution is much easier to read. I was
pleased to find that I could select individual packages in this mode.
However, since I was in low-resolution mode, I had to do a lot of
horizontal scrolling to see which packages were selected as I went
through them. In that screen, perhaps you could put the checkmark on
the left instead of on the right, or give some indicator outside of
the tree view of whether the currently highlighted package is
selected.
Then I was pleased to see that the package installation was going
faster and more smoothly than usual. Maybe that was because my
Mandrake mirror (metalab) was having a good day in terms of speed and
reliability. Anyway, I also noticed that the graphical installer was
giving more information at this stage than the text installer.
The installer actually finished this time, and I got to boot into my
new system. But I couldn't log in because, as I soon found out, the
util-linux package wasn't successfully installed. So I booted the
system in failsafe mode, got my PCMCIA network interface up,
downloaded util-linux, and installed it with rpm. Then I could log
in.
Then I discovered that ViaVoice Outloud and RealPlayer, which I
selected during the package selection phase, weren't installed. I
guess those are included only in the commercial version of
Linux-Mandrake, since they're proprietary.
I'm sorry if this message is too long, but I hope this report will
help the Mandrake developers debug and improve the installer.
Thank you,
--
Matt Campbell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Web site: http://www.crosswinds.net/~mattcamp/
ICQ #: 33005941
