Bug 135825

Mvidner: This has been reported by Andries Brouwer. I will Cc him when he overcomes our registration form.
Let's identify the individual problems here and make smaller bugs out of it.


Installation of SuSE does not become simpler. A time consuming business.

Starting point: Intel PC, 400 MHz, 256 MB, several disks.
On hdb2 a SuSE 9.2 installation
Plan: upgrade to SuSE 10.0.

[Sneak preview: complete failure]

I boot from CD1. Get message "Cannot boot from this CD. Please use CD2".
I boot from CD2. Insert CD1. Ask for "Installation".

[First remark here: There have been times that "Installation"
would overwrite the disk. I choose such an option with fear.
Much more reassuring would be a choice "Installation or Upgrade".]

Rebuilding database takes a long time. I made coffee and drank coffee
and read the newspaper, and it was still rebuilding the database.
(About 1600 packages, I think.) The amount of information is fairly
small. Clearly inferior technology is used here - perhaps many
linear searches, or quadratic algorithms. Rebuilding a list
of packages should not take longer than compiling a kernel.

The upgrade was from 9.2 to 10.0 and it concluded:
"Packages: cannot solve all conflicts - manual intervention required".
Hmm. Pity. Must I really have an opinion about lots of packages and
libraries with names I have never seen before?
It wanted to install KDE but I do not use KDE, and moreover was
afraid that space might be tight, so chose for "minimum graphical,
without Gnome or KDE".
A warning: Do you really want to reset your detailed selection?
Well, I had not selected anything yet, but perhaps the detailed
selection was my installed set of packages. OK.
Now a manual resolution of conflicts - I mostly asked for not installing
anything that conflicted.

Selected "no backups" - mostly because space was tight, and I had
already made a backup of /etc myself.

Now the installation started.

I have two CD readers, one 4x and one 50x. The BIOS can boot only
from the 4x. Earlier installs could use the 50x as installation medium,
but this time that didnt work, it wanted to read from the same device
it had booted from. Pity.
The result was that the estimated time was more than 10 hours,
and the estimated time for the first CD more than 2 hours.
I watched the install for half an hour, but after that the expected
time for the first CD was still more than two hours.
Went to bed. Next morning the screen contains the message
"Cannot boot from this CD. Please use CD2."

Hmm. Probably CD1 finished, and the install procedure autorebooted,
and forgot that reboot from CD1 does not work, since it also failed
last time.

OK. I insert CD2, then CD1, and the same things happen.
In fact the very same things. I had expected that the installation
program would see quickly that this was the second phase of an
installation. But it didnt.

Compared with the night before I noticed only two differences:
(i) the partition was now called a "SuSE 10.0" partition, and
(ii) the install procedure did not want to delete lots of packages.
The list of conflicts was short but nonempty (ial conflicts with fnfx).
Now precisely the same stuff as before is installed. Hmm.

Maybe it was a bug that it rebooted from CD?

After a few hours: again the message on the screen "Cannot boot from
this CD. Please use CD2". Doing that for the third time does not look
like a good idea. I remove the CD and boot from disk.
Get a Grub prompt. Ach.

[I have complained about this before.
It is *EXTREMELY STUPID* (yes, shouting) to change the boot setup
during an upgrade. The system was working, so the boot setup was fine.
Anything changed there can only make matters worse.
Indeed, will make matters worse, I have seen many examples.
Upgrade packages, but by default leave the MBR alone.]

Hmm. Grub. I am a LILO user myself. What does one say to grub?
The word Grub does not occur in the index of the Novell/SUSE
Linux 10.0 Start-Up book that came with these CDs.

grub> ?
Error 27: Unrecognized command.
grub> help
blocklist FILE
...
vbeprobe [MODE]
grub>

Hmm. I want to boot some kernel, so have to specify a device
and a file on that device. Maybe a partition is specified using
the root command. Try "root hdb2", "root hd1(1)", "root hd1,1",
"root hd1:1", "root (hd1,1)". Yes! Fifth attempt, not bad.

[It would really help if Grub answered something more helpful
instead of "Error 11: Unrecognized device string". It might add
"Use, e.g., (hd3,0)." It would be even better if Grub behaved
like a Linux program and used Linux names like hdb6.]

Now that we found the right syntax, the error message changes into
"Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS".
Hmm. Did I select a cylinder? Is the start of hdb2 too far away?

grub> geometry (hd1)
drive 0x81: C/H/S=1024/16/63, 1032192 sectors
partition 0: type 82
partition 1: Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds ...

It looks like it. Maybe grub cannot boot this system today,
or at least I do not know how to proceed. Find a rescue CD.

# mkdir /a
# mount /dev/hdb2 /a
# /a/sbin/lilo -r /a
# umount /a

Reboot into a vanilla 2.6.14. System boots fine,
lots of well-known and less well-known messages.
/etc/init.d/boot: line 283: /dev/tty: No such device or address
More boot stuff. When booting is almost done the screen
goes blank. CapsLock still works, but no reaction to keystrokes,
not even to Alt/F1 or Ctrl/Alt/F1 or Ctrl/Alt/Del.
No echo to a ping from outside. Waited a few minutes.

Rebooted the rescue CD.

# mv /etc /etc-suse
# mv /etc-backup /etc

Rebooted again into 2.6.14. The boot completes and I can send
this mail. There were some error messages. E.g.,
Suseconfig.fonts complains:
use of uninitialized value in pattern match (m//) at /usr/sbin/fonts-config

A somewhat working system, semiupgraded to SUSE 10.0 - no stuff
from CD2-5 was installed.

Since I prefer a well-defined setup and not this mess, I'll probably
do another install of some other distribution this evening.

So far for today,
Andries