[H-GEN] Debian install floppy boot problem

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> On 2003-04-22, Michael Anthon wrote:
> >  Hmmm, I thought the debain installer was just plain text.  The only
> >thing I can think of here is that the kernel is using a frame buffer

> This one is far from plain text.  It uses colours, pretty boxes
> around stuff with frames that end up in weird places, etc., etc.

Sounds like a standard Debian installer to me, which does use a
curses-like thing called dialog(1).  Usually it's pretty solid
(although I have managed to upset it from time to time by trying to
use arrow keys while the machine wants to do something else, and stuff
like that).

> So far, I've tried "vanilla" (which didn't even boot); and bf2.4
> (which I managed to install, with the problems described; but it
> doesn't actually boot after the install).

Wow.  That's highly problematic.

One other thing that occurs to me---if you flip to other virtual
terminals while the installer is running you can get to a shell
which will let you mess about to your heart's content.  I don't know
how useful that'll be though, since you have no compiler and so on
until the installation is complete, which requires a reboot.

At this point I would be considering booting to another OS on the
machine after partitioning and unpacking base*.tgz by hand and then
doing the same for the various packages which might be
required---looking at the install instructions for Debian GNU/HURD can
show you how to do this (a .deb is just a gzip-compressed ar archive
of two tar.gz files, and as such can be unpacked just about anywhere).

> I do have decent dmesg output from FreeBSD which I can show anybody
> who thinks they might recognise useful stuff in it, but I won't
> waste list bandwidth with it now.

I'd be kind of interested in that off-list, sure.  At the moment I can
only guess the machine is full of failing or non-standard components,
or the installer is making all sorts of unwarranted assumptions (which
does tend to happen to older laptops).
-- 
``I didn't program you for sarcasm.''

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