Hi! > Can you give me pointers where those bugreports exist? Do you have > first hand experience that it's not working correctly? > I made netboot images onto my USB sticks and they worked.
This exchange is sadly pretty common when it comes to unetbootin and we see this frequently in #debian. Whenever we get a user reporting a very odd error from the installer, we ask them how they transferred the image to the USB stick and if they say "unetbootin" we just recommend they start again because it is well known to cause problems. Two things then always follow: (1) the problem is solved and the installation completes fine (2) a 3rd party will chip in that unetbootin always works just fine for them [sadly often also accompanied by (3) them telling us we don't know what we're talking about]. We have been unable to figure out what differentiates the users for whom unetbootin does not work from the users for whom it does work. The users who have chosen to use unetbootin are almost invariably not the right people to help debug such problems and so the impasse is perpetuated. (While unetbootin can also do other things like have multiple images on the one disk, that's not the user base we are normally seeing.) Off the top of my head the are the sorts of errors we frequently see are catalogued below. I've quickly grabbed some links from upstream's bug tracker that may (or may not!) provide some more details. All of these errors go away when the exact same image is copied onto the exact same USB stick using cp as detailed in the install guide (or dd or cat or win32diskimager or anything else that just copies the image rather than trying to do whatever mangling unetbootin does). * boot error messages: the prepared image is deeply unhappy and you don't even get as far as a boot loader. (The normal symptom reported by the user is "why aren't debian iso images bootable?"...) https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1198731 * d-i starts but then dies weirdly, seemingly skipping the entire installation https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1348956 * d-i dies very early with "No CD was detected": for some reason, the mounted image is not found by the installer and you don't get past the very first part of the installer where it tries to find the d-i components. https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/622075 * installing the base system fails: sometimes it can't find the .debs, sometimes it can't figure out how to extract them properly https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1048913 * even once d-i looks to have successfully completed, it often seems to install grub to the wrong device and/or has sufficiently confused grub-install as to get the wrong device.map so that the system isn't bootable https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1034975 Clearly not everyone hits these errors but enough do that it's a pain. The errors seem so unrelated to unetbootin that it's very hard to convince users to try remaking the image -- after all, once the kernel is booted and userspace has started, unetbootin should be irrelevant, right? If only. > Also please note it's not a Debian specific tool. But it may exists in > Fedora as well for example. Those users may install a Debian boot to > their USB sticks. Adding a warning for our users won't warn other > users using UNetbootin. Indeed, it would be wonderful if this were actually fixed upstream (or at least documented upstream). In the absence of that, we at least reach a good portion of the user base by noting this in Debian (and its derivatives). cheers Stuart -- Stuart Prescott http://www.nanonanonano.net/ stu...@nanonanonano.net Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/ stu...@debian.org GPG fingerprint 90E2 D2C1 AD14 6A1B 7EBB 891D BBC1 7EBB 1396 F2F7 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org