Bug#450812: installation-reports: partitioning confusion, manual archive failure, GUI breakage

From: Ross Boylan <RossBoylan(at)stanfordalumni.org>
Date: Sun Nov 11 2007 - 02:13:12 EST

Package: installation-reports
Severity: normal

http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/boot.img.gz dated 10 Nov (I thought it was 04 Nov when I got it earlier today). http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso dated 04 Nov

I used the installation manual in testing.

Install via USB onto a Dell Latitude D630 with Vista Preinstalled. Vista partition shrunk via MS system admin tools. I had the wired LAN connected, and a local DHCP server running.

I selected expertgui and encountered the following problems (not in chronological order; sort of in decreasing order of apparent importance or bugginess). All reports are from memory, and may have inaccuracies.

1. GUI STUCK After a lot of work in partman and partman-lvm I hit ESC on one of the screens. I was left with a screen showing the logo on top and "Partition Disks" but no buttons. Nothing I tried moved me from this screen. vt4 showed (as best I can copy it) debconf: cdebconf_gtp (process...): GLib-GObject -CRITICAL: g_object_ref: asertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

debconf: cdebconf_gtp (proces ...): Gdk - CRITICAL: gdk_window_process_updates: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (wiindow)' failed

debconf: cdebconf_gtk (process...) GLib-GObject -CRITICAL: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

2. KEY SEQUENCE TO SWITCH SCREENS
the documented left-alt-Fn did not move me between virtual terminals. The traditional ctl-alt-Fn did.

3. COULDN'T GET MANUAL MIRROR SELECTION TO WORK WITH APT-CACHER I am running apt-cacher with path_map on my main system. On that system, sources.list entries like
deb http://debian.betterworld.us:3142/mainline testing main contrib non-free work (though there have been issues). apt-cacher.conf has path_map = mainline linux.csua.berkeley.edu/debian; security security.debian.org
At the step to select a mirror I elected manual, but could not get things to work (it kept saying bad mirror). I tried (machine|path)

debian.betterworld.us:3142|mainline
debian.betterworld.us:3142/mainline|
debian.betterworld.us:3142/linux.csua.berkeley.edu|debian

and several other things, but couldn't get it to work (the first 2 tried to use the path_map while the last was a vanilla use of apt-cacher). apt-cacher logs show

---

Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: got: GET /debian/dists/unstable/Release HTTP/1.1
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Processing a new request line
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: got: Host: debian.betterworld.us
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Processing a new request line
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: got: User-Agent: Wget
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Processing a new request line
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: got: Connection: close
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Processing a new request line
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: got: 
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Resolved request is /debian/dists/unstable/Release
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: new index file: debian_dists_unstable_Release
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: looking for /var/cache/apt-cacher/packages/debian_dists_unstable_Release
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: known as index file: Release
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Entering critical section : file download decision
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: file does not exist or so, creating it
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: MISS
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: Exiting critical section
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: fetcher: try to fetch 
http://debian/dists/unstable/Release
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [29792]: registred child process: 15287
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Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: registered child process: 15288
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: checks done, can return now
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: download agent: getting 
http://debian/dists/unstable/Release
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: Get is back
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: Reporting error: 404
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: Entering critical section : HTTP error report
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: Exiting critical section
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: Upstream server returned error 404 for index /var/cache/apt-cacher/packages/debian_dists_unstable_Release. Deleting.
Sat Nov 10 21:52:23 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15288]: fetcher exiting
Sat Nov 10 21:52:24 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Entering critical section : reading the header file
Sat Nov 10 21:52:24 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Exiting critical section
Sat Nov 10 21:52:24 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Header sent: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Connection: Close

Sat Nov 10 21:52:24 2007|192.168.40.44|debug [15287]: Package sent

---

So the location information is not being mapped as expected (e.g., fetch http://debian/dists... is silly). I am not sure if I didn't enter things right or if this is a problem in the installer or apt-cacher.

I fell back to the standard selection of a mirror (ultimately picking the berkeley server) and that worked.

4. PARTITIONING/LVM/ENCRYPTION FOLLIES
I had a lot of problems figuring out how to setup the partitions. First, I am still unsure whether linux and/or the installer is capable of encrypting individual logical volumes under LVM. This would be my preferred setup.
Second, when I marched through what looked like the obvious choices it wanted to wipe out everything on the disk (yes, I selected "let LVM control the whole disk"--I thought it would take the whole free area on the disk).
I wanted to have a boot partition outside of LVM, and ended up manually creating that partition and then another for the volume group. The installation manual made it sound as if a separate boot partition would be created automatically if one used LVM, but I didn't want to chance it.
Then I manually created logical volumes, and went through activating them and mapping them to directories. I was in the middle of this (I think I was just trying to create a new volume) when the problem in point 1 arose.
This all seemed rather tedious and manual (why are the volumes shown as inactive). I know manual partitioning in expert mode is not intended to be easy and automatic, but I wonder if could be a little easier.

I did commit the new partitions to disk; I expect that by doing so I have messed up my MS boot.

5. LOCALE CHOICES UNDERDOCUMENTED
The locales list came with no explanation of the codes. I found them via wikipedia.

I realize that some of this may be a side effect of expert mode.

The GUI installer looks very slick, at least compared to the previous non-graphical ones. I was impressed with how smoothly it went aside from the problems listed above.
-- System Information:

Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (990, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

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