I have finally managed to get some working debian installation disks made
that allow you to install on top of xfs or reiserfs thanks to changes made
in the latest boot-floppies package. I used a 2.4.7 vanilla kernel with the
xfs patch added. The disk set is far from perfect but it will work as far as
"Install Base System" without problems and the problems that it has past that
are recoverable. The problems I encountered are as follows:
1. The "Install Base System" section of the installation exited with errors
that were unrecoverable enough to disallow normal installation to proceed.
I had to manually select the steps that are supposed to follow "Install
Base System".
2. No fstab was written. This resulted in a system that would boot but leave
the root filesystem mounted as read-only. Executing a shell from the
installation program and running "nano-tiny /target/etc/fstab" to enter
an fstab by hand before rebooting the new system will fix this problem.
3. The system was left with a non-functional /etc/apt/sources.list file.
This will effectively make it impossible to finish installing the system
past the base system. To fix this you should delete the non-functional
entry in /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian woody main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US woody/non-US main contrib
non-free
I have not had time to test the installer's ability to create filesystems of
different types within the same installation yet but I have tested a completely
xfs installation and a completely reiserfs installation and both work with
the above caveats. You can pick the disks up at http://www.lwfug.org/debian.
Enjoy!
Russ
--
Russel H. Ingram
Gargoyle Computer Consulting
(307)742-1361 or (307)760-1317
www.gargoylecc.com
|