| Torgoton | My netboot install seems to be taking a very VERY long time... 60 minutes with no activity on screen 4. Is there any way to check up on it? | 02:04 |
|---|---|---|
| Torgoton | OK. It took 72 minutes. :) | 02:15 |
| Torgoton | I'm having an install issue, and no one in Ubuntu seems to have knowledge. Should I ask elsewhere, or is this the place? | 04:01 |
| Torgoton | Well, I'll ask and see what happens. | 04:02 |
| Torgoton | I'm doing a netboot install on a very old (bare minimum) machine. I didn't mark any install components for download, and now every ten seconds on console 4, debian-installer segfaults and restarts. segfault at 00000001 error ffff0004. eip b7ed3569 and esp changes. oops. eip changes sometimes too. | 04:03 |
| cjwatson | Torgoton: if you're sure you're running the 386 variant - *could* be running out of memory | 11:38 |
| cjwatson | Torgoton: you could try explicitly booting with lowmem=2 although I think that should be the default once you're at minimum memory anyway | 11:38 |
| cjwatson | Torgoton: and check a little further back in console 4 to see if it shows any kind of reason | 11:39 |
| cjwatson | (you can use 'nano -v /var/log/syslog' on console 2 although you might have to somehow stop d-i segfaulting first, since it might well respawn on the current console ...) | 11:40 |
| Torgoton | cjwatson: Thank you for those tips. I thought it might have something to do with not selecting any installer components. I restarted last night and am at that screen right now. I think I'll try adding IDE and perhaps PCMCIA network, since I'm using those during the install. Is that a good idea, or are those for something else? | 13:45 |
| cjwatson | sounds like a good idea but unlikely to affect the segfault | 14:01 |
| cjwatson | the debian-installer program that's segfaulting is just a shell script - a segfault indicates quite a low-level problem that is unlikely to be related to which components you have selected | 14:01 |
| Torgoton | OK. Thanks again. Will try a couple of these and go from there. If it doesn't work again, I'll try a serial console so I can hopefully capture some useful information. | 14:03 |
| Torgoton | This time it ran out of memory: Out of memory: kill process 19285 (sh) score 43 or a child - Killed process 19286 (ar) - tar invoked oom-killer... Can't scroll back much at all on console 4. It downloaded several packages, and was on libc6-udeb when it died. | 14:32 |
| Torgoton | Will try lowmem=2 | 14:32 |
| Torgoton | This time, I selected only IDE and PCMCIA NIC, but no kernel, and got the segfaulting behavior again. I'm trying to start nano, but a console takes a while to appear. There it goes... looking at syslog. | 17:26 |
| Torgoton | tar invoked oom-killer. Looks like I am out of memory, and that I can't do a bare minimum install (I have 36MB RAM) and netboot because it needs more RAM. I'll try adding a swap partition. | 17:28 |
| evand | There's a use case for ubiquity ;) | 17:33 |
| Torgoton | ahhh. If only I had a CD drive on this machine. | 17:39 |
| cjwatson | might be worth pulling the hard disk out and installing via another machine, at that rate ... | 17:58 |
| Torgoton | cjwatson: Maybe. Or I've got enough room in a DOS partition for an ISO... I'd just have to get the ISO file on the drive. | 18:00 |
| Torgoton | ... perhaps with a parallel cable. :) | 18:00 |
| Torgoton | Will the installer use a swap partition? Would I have to format it with mkswap beforehand? | 18:02 |
| cjwatson | it'll use a swap partition if it exists, yes, but only once it gets as far as partitioning, which is later than you've got ... | 18:03 |
| Torgoton | ok | 18:04 |
| cjwatson | you might be able to force it on before that | 18:04 |
| Torgoton | oooh | 18:04 |
| cjwatson | as long as you don't need to change the partition table | 18:04 |
| Torgoton | There's a thought. | 18:04 |
| cjwatson | rereading the partition table requires deactivating any swap on that disk, you see ... | 18:04 |
| Torgoton | Sure. Makes sense. | 18:04 |
| cjwatson | the main gotcha is that the installer might need to read stuff off the CD before it has the driver necessary to get at the hard disk | 18:06 |
| cjwatson | so it might be something of a manual job ... | 18:06 |
| Torgoton | Well... this whole process isn't exactly for the timid on this machine. | 18:09 |
| Torgoton | OK. If I try to install from an ISO in a DOS partition, which image should I use? The regular alternate installation CD, or (hopefully) a much smaller one? A URL for a page to read would be fine. | 18:11 |
| cjwatson | I don't see why installing from an ISO would help you, from your description | 18:14 |
| cjwatson | and that sort of arrangement complicates partitioning | 18:14 |
| cjwatson | (because the ISO has to stay loop-mounted, which means the partition table can't be re-read ...) | 18:15 |
| cjwatson | you could try the netboot mini.iso, I suppose, which wouldn't have to stay mounted; with that, as long as you can boot off it, it just needs to read the kernel and initrd and then has no need to mount the ISO under Linux | 18:16 |
| Torgoton | I see. What I did a while back was to install Debian from floppies, then used that to netboot Ubuntu 6.04. The details are here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_on_a_ThinkPad_750P, but I've tried another tack this time. | 18:17 |
| cjwatson | http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/386/mini.iso | 18:17 |
| Torgoton | Well I do have the linux and initrd.gz loading with linld097 from DOS right now, so am I basically the same place I'd be with that mini ISO? | 18:17 |
| cjwatson | I should go and do Christmas prep, though :) | 18:17 |
| cjwatson | yes, it wouldn't really help | 18:18 |
| Torgoton | OK. Have a great holiday. | 18:18 |
| Torgoton | And thank you for your time. | 18:18 |
| Torgoton | I have to bake a cheesecake myself. | 18:18 |
| cjwatson | oh, I think Evan's remark about ubiquity above was intended more as "wow, that would be a tough use case to meet" rather than "this is something ubiquity can help you with now" | 18:18 |
| Torgoton | This one: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2008/11/caramel-pumpkin-gingersnap-cheesecake-so-there/ | 18:18 |
| cjwatson | my feeling is that trying to get a swap partition up early is the avenue with the highest probability of success | 18:19 |
| Torgoton | Excellent. I'll study that some more. | 18:19 |
| cjwatson | not 100% though :) | 18:19 |
| Torgoton | I can always fall back to an old Debian install and try that way too. | 18:19 |
| evand | indeed, apologies for the confusion. | 18:21 |
| Torgoton | I'm always slightly confused anyway. Just blends with the noise. | 18:23 |
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