Hi Debian installer! I thought this installation issue can be usefull, so I forward this message.
My friend uses debian since at least 10 years, not exactly a newbie but not a debian developper. Hope this can help. Best regards Mike ----- Message Transféré ----- Date : Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:07:54 +0200 (CEST) De : Seb <[email protected]> À : Mike <[email protected]> Sujet : Why I wasted Debian's bandwidth Hi Mike, Sorry to write to you in English. I reinstalled Debian on my home computer this week and ran into a few problems that should interest someone in Debian's team. Problem is, I don't know who to forward this to. But you might :-) A little background: I reinstalled Debian after messing with a swap partition left the machine broken (my bad, careless). The computer is not a laptop. I can't run cables in the house so I rely on wifi. I first downloaded a netinstall CD, small ISO, and copied it to a USB stick. As you know I like to cherry pick my packages and I use fvwm, so my basic install is quite small. The install worked quite well. In particular, the two wifi cards (of which one is embedded in the motherboard) were correctly detected and the wifi ran smoothly to download packages from the mirrors. When presented with a dselect-type choice toward the end of the installation, I elected not to install a graphical system. After all, most of the related packages are useless for fvwm. Problem 1: this left me with a machine with no internet connexion. This is all the more frustrating since this part worked well during install. I know it's been pointed out many times to the d-i team, but for my part I still don't understand the rationale behind this choice. Why should the connexion part be installed on the system only if a graphical UI is installed? So I had no way to install network-manager. In the past, the authors of this excellent software relied on a GUI being installed, but now there is the smallish nmtui that does the job from the console. OK, so I reinstalled. Ah, but there was a snag. On this machine there are two RAID1 arrays (on two SATA disks), one small for /, one big for /home. For reasons unknown, both arrays could be assembled but the second one was deemed unusable by the partitioner even though there was no problem during the previous install. I fsck'd it just in case, but to no avail. I reinstalled once again: same problem. OK, I thought I could take care of this once the machine was installed. I made the same choices except that I checked the box for a graphical interface. The package number shot up from 350 to 1400, approximately. Problem 2: once the install was finished, I could not login as root from the GUI. I entered the correct password several times. It seems that logging in as root in a GUI context is impossible (one more reason for me to prefer loging into the console). Therefore I could manually mount the RAID1 partition destined to become my /home, but I could not put it to use since a user was already using the files from the existing /home partition. (It's not exactly true, I now think I could have fiddled with fstab and rebooted. But I was unnerved by the unexpected root situation and did not think of it on the spot.) OK, so I downloaded this time a full DVD image (the first disk) and copied the ISO to a USB stick. The install went fine, including using both RAID1 partitions. Problem 3: sources.list included a "cdrom:" entry so apt-get did not know how to use my USB stick to find the .debs. OK, so I fiddled with mount's options until I had the DVD's contents in /media/cdrom. Problem 4: nmtui is not on that DVD1. I know choices have to be made, and perhaps popcon is not in favor of nmtui. But perhaps one could make the case that packages that are relied upon to create an internet connexion should be on the first DVD. Problem 5: before downloading the DVD image I did try to check whether nmtui would be on it, but I could not find the information. Perhaps it would be nice to have a sorted "list-of-packages.txt" next to the download link. (I'm sure the information exists somewhere, I'm just pointing out that it's not located where we most want it to be.) OK, so in the end I hardcoded every fscking details of the wifi connexion in /etc/network/interfaces and finally got the wifi to work. Overall, I have wasted several GB of bandwidth and I feel sorry for that. I also wasted several hours and I feel cheated for that. It would sure be nice if a connexion that works during install was kept functional after rebooting :-) I imagine there are good reasons for the current situation, so I suggest a compromise: in the dselect-like menu toward the end of the installation, below "SSH server" (which I checked), add an "Internet connexion" pre-checked entry, so that users can make a choice here and be warned of the consequences if they don't select it. (Or, maybe, a machine that is to become an "SSH server" should have the internet connexion, no question asked.) Kind regards, Sébastien. -- A+ Mike
