I tried to install an alpha station using the debian installer. Here are the
problems I noticed. Note that I still can't get to the end of the
installation process.
Note that I've got a 1GB hard drive and 72MB of RAM and I'm using the french
translation for installation.
I want to boot from network as I've got nothing else to boot : no CD drive and
the flopppy drive is not working properly. I setup tftp and bootp server.
Then I don't know how to get a bootable kernel as the debian installer build
produces a vmlinuz which isn't directly bootable from the network on alpha.
I got a correct one thanks Steve Langasek.
When it comes to network hardware detection, I see that more than half of the
time is spent detecting ide and scsi devices (it's a bit long on my old
alpha) moreover this will be done again later. Then I get a problem with my
network card, it's due to the 2.4 kernel which doesn't handle 21040 properly
(tulip driver). Hopefully I got another one.
Then its comes to partitionning, first the help on lvm isn't translated in
french. Then I couldn't install in lvm because I couldn't find any way to
create a physical volume. I chose to partition the disk by hand.
Something weird is that the menu label saying that we're finished with
partitioning is a the top of the menu.
Well it was my second try and after modifing nothing except affecting / to the
first partition, I get a warning message asking me if I wanted to validate
changes on hard drive partition. Pretty disturbing.
As a note for french translators, there is a {MOUNT_POINT} in the formating
progress bar, I think a $ is missing.
After this I typed "df" in the console just to see what was happening and I
saw that I got about 100 000TB in hard drive and about 6 000TB in an shm
partition !!
There is also an apt-get install e2fsprog libc6.1 ... which doesn't have any
progress bar, this is dirturbing to have a blue screen to look for, waiting
for a movement.
Moreover note that in case of error, go back and continue often have the same
meaning, I couldn't see the differences.
Here starts the problems I tried multiple times, but it fails here : after
downloading packages it produces an error on the third console and never goes
farther. Substiancially, it says :
ln : /target/usr/bin/awk : file exists
/target/dev/pts no such file or directory
/target/dev/shm no such file or directory
/target/proc/bus/usb no such file or directory
Note that /target/proc isn't mounted.
I hope this wasn't too long and that it can be useful for you.
I don't know which of these are bugs or my fault, so I give it to you as a
pack. May I fill bugs for some ?
All I can't say is that this installer is a great job and I will be happy to
try it again.
Have a good day
B. Peccatte
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