ac1-qboot.iso testing

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 03:44:43PM -0400, Jay Estabrook wrote:
> Thanks to Sergey and Cristian, the ISO image "ac1-qboot.iso" was made
> available for anon FTP at ftp.rdsor.ro:

I tried a bit more thoroughly the latest test boot image, i.e.
ac1-qboot1.iso from April 14th, on UP1500 (Nautilus).  In general it
boots and appears to work but here are various things which failed.

1. When booting into a "rescue" a code which mounts filesystems
expects to find /mnt/sysimage/sys after a root file system from a disk
is mounted.  If this is an older installation, like RH7.2-Alpha, then
this mount point does not exist and you are getting "some error
occurred" message.  Nothing more illuminating in logs or other screens
and some file systems may end up not mounted.  It is hard to guess
what really happened.  If you will add that "/sys" then everything
mounts just fine.  I would think that either this error should be
ignored or "mount -p /mnt/sysimage/sys" should be done once there is a
place for this.  The later can be difficult as file systems are
possibly mounted read-only and maybe partially scrambled (which
may make some mountpoints to vanish even if they were there before).

2. Some scripts, possibly from a freshly mounted filesystems, expect
/bin/bash.  There is a /bin/sh link and /usr/bin/bash but you will
get "missing interpreter" if a /bin/bash link is not added.

3. Attempts to configure a network interface via DHCP failed.  It
appears that this is using /usr/bin/pump written in Python.  That
returns very quickly but no address is ever configured.  Running
'pump -i eth0' directly has the same effect.  OTOH I can make eth0 work
by reconfiguring it with  'ifconfig' from BusyBox which is available.
Also specyfing a static address instead of DHCP, when asked, seems to
work (once I had to take eth0 down and reconfigure it with 'ifconfig'
again before it started moving traffic but maybe I made a typo?).  My
network card is one of Tulips (PCI id 1011:0019).  I do not know if a
behaviour with de4x5 driver would be different.  Although the last one
is available on a boot image a file 'pcitable' is not listing that
driver for any of network cards.

4. When I tried an installer in a text mode then every time, to my
great surprise, I got as far as "Running anaconda, the AlphaCore
system installer - please wait" and the next line was "install exited
abnormally" with no chance to check what really happened.  Expected
for now?  I am rather used to troubles in a graphics mode. :-)
Moreover "rescue" seems be rather close to "text" and the former works.

5. In a graphics mode an installer starts fine and goes through
all preparatory stages.  There is a catch.  It does "Searching for
Fedora Core installations" and apparently is not finding anything,
or results are ignored, so there is no option to upgrade but only
to install.  This is in a marked difference with a rescue mode search
which correctly identified all possible candidates for a root file
system (I happen to have here more than one).  The surprise is
that I would think that the same search code would be used.  Logs
indicate that various file systems are mounted but if anything peeks
there it is hard to tell.  I have copies of anaconda.log and syslog
if anybody would like to have a look but they do not seem to be
telling very much.

What a text mode would do with that I have no idea.  See point 4.

  Michal