[arch-releng] Install experience with v2011-02-25

[Vincent Van Houtte]

Thank you for replying to my message.

> first off all, please compose new mails rather then replying to
> unrelated threads.

My bad - you are right.

> > * ERROR 1: I was trying to find the best way to 'manage the
> > filesystems', and I screwed up, at which point I hit 'cancel'. I
> > received an error 'ask_option $2 must be the title' and the installer
> > exited.
> 
> Do you have the aif logfile? Or the output of the report-issues script?
> Any specific reason you did not run report-issues? (it should inform
> you about that through the MOTD, is it not visible - enough - ?)

I think I have seen it, but the fact that I did not think of it a few
moments later, I guess I didn't take it in. I'll try to reproduce and
then run report-issues.

> > * ERROR 2: I tried once to use BTRFS instead of ext4, but it never
> > allowed me to chose a mountpoint (BUT: as I continued trying, and used
> > LVM - infra - I noticed that new entries were added to the list of
> > filesystems to manage, so it could be that I did not notice the same
> > behaviour when trying out BTRFS - if that is the case, one might chose
> > to add a blank line before the new entries and after the /dev/sdxy's)
> 
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/22427

OK - no problem: I plan on using ext4 anyway.

> > * ERROR 3: Then I used ext4 on my sdb3, checking the option to format
> > the partition with aif, but that failed. exiting the installer and
> > preparing/formatting the disk manually, worked. Using aif only to set
> > the mountpoints worked.
> 
> I really need to know the specific error to be able to fix that. maybe
> the device was in use because of something you were doing? (or because
> aif did something with it in a previous run, in which case you should
> have rollbacked - unless aif crashed, of course)

Nope, I forgot to add to my message that rolling back worked just fine.
There was no real 'error' and aif did not crash - it just trew an error
about being unable to create an ext4 filesystem. I'll try to reproduce
it this evening and see if I can get an exact warning/error.

> > * ERROR 4: Next was creating an LVM on the array. It was a simple
> > LVM: 1 primary volume, 1 logical volume and formatted as ext4. I got
> > an error on 'making lvm-lv': 'process_filesystem needs a partition as
> > $1'. It occurred to me later that I might have entered a
> > partition-size that was larger than the available amount, but the
> > installer did not warn me about that and just exited. I also found it
> > hard to use the LVM-portion of aif.
> 
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/19454

Aah, my post-factum thought was probably correct. I'll try to do this
correct tonight and report back. I noticed that there is no option to
use the entire disk for an LV, which might be a handy feature.

> > I noticed that the installer report said that 'installing bootloader'
> > had finished succesfully.
> 
> maybe you selected the entry in the menu and then said "i will install
> my own", aif counts that as success.

Yes, that's what happened. Maybe I could suggest to change the
'succes'-message to 'manual installation'? It's not a bug per se, only
something I noticed.

> > I think I can live with most of this, but any hints on how to install
> > grub2 with aif (or after aif) would be much appreciated.
> 
> grub2 is not supported, and I have no idea how it works. we might
> support it if someone can contribute simple code to make it work.
> we will probably support syslinux though, work on that is in progress
> (as you can see on this list)

Yes, I have seen the patches. In the Ubuntu help docs I found an extra
argument to grub-install (<grub2) named --root-directory, which might
help installing grub2 for the newly installed system that is mounted
under /mnt...

> > The wiki on
> > 'SSD' also told me that I had to make a 1 MiB bios-partition at the
> > beginning of my SSD, but the wiki never says what you should do with
> > that partition...
> 
> yeah well.. it's up to the community to maintain the wiki.  I only take
> care of the official installation guide (and even there I expect input
> from the community)

I was not blaming you or anyone else - it's just something I don't know,
and kinda hoped someone on this list might shed some light upon (after
all, there are devs around in this channel writing code around
bootloaders etc...)

> thanks,

No, thank YOU for your time and efforts. I can only hope that a report
like this one is helpful and not just taking more of your time. That's
why I will run the same routine this evening and provide 'report-issues'
where I can...

Vincent