Hi,
I had been working hard for 4 days in order to install a new distrib of
Linux. I am not a beginner and the situation is the following:
- the target computer is remote, it has no display nor keyboard. All I
can do on the target computer is to switch it on, and to wait that
the network is established so that I can telnet it from another
computer. I have access to the floppy disk, so I may boot from
floppy or from harddisk. The network consists in a PLIP line (with
another Linux machine)
I was running Linux 1.2.13, with an elf-Slackware distribution... and
I wanted to upgrade :-) Here comes the game!
1st/ I made my own boot and root disk so that I can boot the target
computer without its hard disks and with but the network (/usr is
a nfs mounted directory, telnet working and so on...)
2nd/ I had the hope to perform a remote install with Debian (or
Redhat) distrib.
Well, I guess that neither Debian nor Redhat has forseen such a
situation. I fighted hard vs. the last Redhat distrib, and I came to
the conclusion that it would be faster to give up and to try the
Debian distrib. What I did.
I tried the Debian 0.9xxxx (InfoMagic CDroms , Sept 1995). I made a
copy of the /bin, /sbin, /etc... directories of the root disk, and I
tried to use the 'dinstall' programme. Actually I had to patch some
d-utilities in order to reflect the fact that the 'Debian Root disk'
was mounted under the /floppy directory and not directly from /. And I
succeeded (more or less). The base system that this distribution
installed on my hard-disks (after some little modifications) was
enough so that the PLIP network was correctly initialized, and so that
I could access the machine with a telnet call (It seemed that the
netbase and netstd were installed by default).
This night I tried to upgrade the system with one of the latest
Debian distrib (1.2 I guess, InfoMagic from April 1997). Mmmhh.
It appeared that the old system was in 'aout' (I forgot that detail when I
began the install), and it seems that the new distrib does not
correctly upgrade the 'aout' system into an 'elf' system. More
precisely, I had been unable to upgrade the ldso package (ld.so-1.7.3
to ld.so-1.8.10). The two ldconfig (the old one and the new one) seems
to re-initialize the libs... but (I may be wrong since I have a very
short understanding of the way the dynamic loader works) after
ld.so-1.8.10 was set up with (the new) ldconfig, most of the binaries
didn't work (can not load ld.so-1.7.0 !?). I am not sure that this a
correlated to a problem of 'aout' to 'elf' upgrade.. but well.
I thought that it would be easier for me to re-install everything from
scratch. What I did this morning! But since I was unable to uncompress
and to mount the 'rescue' disk somewhere on my minimal system... well,
I tried hard to get a screen and a keyboard :-)
It didn't took me too long to reinstall the base system. I modified
the /etc/securetty file so that root could log in remote. I made my
own changes in the /etc/hosts and /etc/init.d/network so that the
computer boot and initialize the PLIP connection. I disconneted the
screen and the keyboard. And rebooted the machine. And nothing :-(
The netbase and netstd are no more installed with the base system!!
Well... It didn't took me too long to install these two packages (and
the cpp package which is somehow required for netbase or netstd) and I
could begin the real install! :-)
It seems that in this InfoMagic CDROM the win32binary package link
is brocken in the base directory... But well, this is not so much of
a problem :-).
As you can see, I do not need any X-server, but I need the xlib since
I may use other X-display. It appears that the kernel sources needs
tk4 (tk4.6 I guess but I'm not sure) and tk4 needs the "elf-x11r6lib"
package... which doesn't exist!? What's going on?
OK, I still have some dependancies problems which do not appear at
the 'dselect' stage but appear at the 'dpkg' configuration stage. I
guess I can manage them :-)
This mail was intended to demonstrate that you made an excellent work
since we still can use your work in situations you didn't forsee! This
was also intended to show what kind of difficulties I went through,
but maybe you can learn from this some new improvements for the
next versions of the Debian distribution.
Thank you for your attention,
Stéf II
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