The Incredible State of Almost

[vakkotaur]

Looking around Distrowatch a bit, I found a few more possible candidates for icelandic. Of these, I decided to try DeadCD. Last night I tried it.

As a run-from-CD thing, DeadCD is quite good. It found the hardware correctly, save perhaps for a sound card, which isn't a show-stopper. It found the network and set itself up to use it. It came up reasonably fast on a Pentium-166 and with the fluxbox window manager even the graphic mode is fairly responsive.

There is an option, using deadeasy from console to install to the hard drive. The installer shows some thought went into things. The first menu offers a choice of partitioning (using cfdisk), formatting, and the actual install itself. Partitioning and formatting work out fine, and the installer looks good. It warns that the progress bar makes big jumps but can spend a long time between jumps. It lets you edit lilo.conf and fstab during the install with an editor that has on-screen user hints. Overall, it looks wonderful, especially after the last couple distributions I tried. There are some artifacts of English as a Second Language, but I can let those go.

It was good that it was so impressive, as the one thing it did not do was install lilo correctly. This led to much fiddling around and many reboots, some with the CD, some with the DeLi boot disk(s) with much help from jmaynard. It got late before we got it working right. There is at least one more thing to try, and I do intend to e-mail the developer and ask what's going on. Considering the rest of DeadCD, it's rather odd to have such a basic thing as booting not work right. I suppose as the last resort, it could be updated to being a full-blown Debian (on which DeadCD is based) and fixed from there - but that seems just plain excessive.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen this distribution.

However, lilo is (or can be) notoriously difficult to set up with some hardware. This is not really the fault of lilo's authors, nor of linux. It is the failure of OEMs to agree upon and follow some more universal standards than merely those needed to get by with Microsoft operating systems. Because the BIOS is written to work hand in hand with Windows, not Linux, lilo sometimes has to make guesses. And sometimes those guesses aren't right. There are overrides to cover virtually everything, but unless you know in advance that they are needed for your hardware, you end up doing a lot of poking around to get it right.

I agree, this is not user friendly. Newer hardware is usually a lot more cooperative. But the "old" (as in more than 5 years ago) stuff can be a PITA. I know this, having installed Linux on a number of Compaq machines. It always works eventually...

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I'm not ready to blame the hardware, having had no trouble with other distributions getting lilo installed on it.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you're hitting a cylinder boundary limitation because this distro is partitioning the hard drive differently from other distros. This is usually worked around by having a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think it's that the installer didn't copy the necessary initrd to the hard disk. So far, our efforts to get the thing running have assumed the initrd wasn't necessary. I now believe that it is, and copying it from the CD to the hard disk, then telling lilo to point the kernel at it, will fix the problem.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

After fiddling around more and getting things almost working, it couldn't mount its own drive as it couldn't handle the ext3 filesystem it put there. After a bit fiddling about, we ran into the wall that is the need for dpkg. I then repartitioned the disk and made a small boot partition and tried another install. That one skipped all the other fiddling about but ran slam into the same wall. Ah well.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

After hearing that you and jmaynard weren't using an initrd, it's most likely the ext3 module necessary to mount the (root?) filesystem(s) on the hard drive is in that initrd image. Telling lilo about the initrd (and restoring the initrd from the CD, if necessary) should fix it.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Did that. Claimed it couldn't find ext3.ko. Got mad and blew up.

We tried rebuilding the initrd from the stuff on the hard disk, but mkinitrd wanted to dpkg install something, and the dpkg infrastructure isn't here.

Is there a way to mount (probably via loopback) the initrd and see what's in it?

[yakko.livejournal.com]

Most initrds I've seen are ext2 or compressed ext2, but the most recent ones seem to be compressed ROM fs. Either way, and once you get rid of the gzip compression if your initrd is ext2, you should be able to mount the initrd via a loop device.