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mandrake 9.1 installation: horrible experience


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Anybody else with similar freeze experiences ?

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=3949

not exactly....but it was nerve racking at the time!

 

Whahoo!...installed this evening and lovin it! 

 

I like the new install config and the end (expert install). I was a little concerned during pkg install of cd1 though. The hd seemed to be doing something but the time said 27 minutes for like 10 minutes, then went to 26 minutes for a second and back up to 29 , then back to 27 for about 5 minutes, then asked for cd2.....then all was well.

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Well had a number of problems too but basically went pretty smooth until I tried to make a boot disk while in the install phase. It would just hang, so had to reset, while maybe didn't HAVE to but didn't know about the diagnostics procedurs mentioned above.

 

I ended up not trying to make the boot disk then everything went OK. But here is another little wierd thing.....

After about the 5th try to install ( I have another drive with LM 9.0 on the same computer) the partitioning tool wouldn't allow me to make a /root

folder because it said I already had one. It was looking at the other drive.

 

I ended up unhooking that drive to do the install then all went OK, Yes I think there are a few bugs, v9.0 never had these problems.

 

Also when trying to make a boot disk in KDE I found that there was not room on the floppy. Seems the kernel image in /boot is about 1.25 mb. whereas the one in LM 9.0 is more like 800+ kb, big difference.

 

Still haven't tried to sort this one out. Any help would be appreciated.

 

In the meantime I suppose I could try to thin the kernel down by recompiling. Wonder why noone else (that I could find) has mentioned this as a problem, puzzle puzzle :?

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It's definitely a bug; I have the same problem. I wound up making my boot floppy by hand proving it can fit on one floppy; they just didn't bother to implement it properly and I reported this bug during the RC phase on more than one occasion :evil: It's kind of an involved process but I'll post it on a new thread if anyone's interested.

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pmpatrick,

 

Thanks for the reply and "Yes", I'm interested in that boot floppy tutorial.

 

I was reading a little HOWTO on that , but like many HOWTO's, it tells you everything in the world how to do it but I am the kind that needs something a little more straight forward.

 

I'm sure a few others will appreciate it before long. :) So thanks in advance.

 

larryt

 

( P.S. , I would thinK something like this would have been a MAJOR priority for MANDRAKE), embarrassing beyond belief, I would think?) :roll:

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Also when trying to make a boot disk in KDE I found that there was not room on the floppy. Seems the kernel image in /boot is about 1.25 mb. whereas the one in LM 9.0 is more like 800+ kb, big difference.
Thats still less than 1.44MB. Did
dd if=floppy.iamge of=/dev/fd0

work ? Obviously, this is a mandrake bug (as confirmed by pmpatrick).

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NDEB says:

-------------------

"Thats still less than 1.44MB. Did

 

Code:

 

 

dd if=floppy.iamge of=/dev/fd0

 

work ? Obviously, this is a mandrake bug (as confirmed by pmpatrick)"

----------------

Hi ndeb,

 

Yes, but that ~1.25 mb was just the kernel. The rest of the files on the boot (that is, tried to put on boot disk) added up to a lot more than 1.44 mb. mainly, I think because of the LARGE kernel image.

So what i'm doing now is recompiling. I think I have taken enough out but will wait to see. I've just started the "make modules_install" so shouldn't be too long.

 

Thanks for bringing the above command back to my attention,

i'll give that a try pretty quick.

 

Larry

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ndeb,

 

Thanks for that link.

 

I had already compiled but I did't do 'make clean' 'cause I read recently some people had better luck without it.

Not for me, I redid using 'make clean' and it went OK.

 

HOWEVER, uumm, after it made its way through LILO the screen went black so I guess I borked the job. I did get the kernel down by about 300kb (now is 951 kb) though which was enough.

According to the hd activity it seemed to be booting so I believe it was a screen problem I caused.

 

I'll go look at the link above and see what it says.

 

Thanks, :)

Larry

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pmpatrick,

 

That is good info to have, a big ''thank you".

 

It went well except the two (neither) small txt files would fit on. So I thought I would go ahead and install some of the upgrades mentioned by ndeb as someone said it worked for them.

Well, I didn't install them all , just 34 files, tried to guess at which ones were relevant. Left out Samba and such.

 

After that I rebooted to be safe and 'same 'ole story'.

 

Since my eyes have rested a bit from the wee hours of this morning, I

think I will copy my stock kernel to another folder as before and give it

another go.

 

I think that floppy will actually hold those files because it reports 1.42 mb.

 

I'll check back here a little later on :)

Larry

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I can't understand why you are having this problem. Apart from vmlinuz, the other four files that I mention in my post total 1.634 KB. That should leave a boatload of room for your vmlinuz. The only thing that could be potentially different is initrd.img but I can't imagine it being that different. Check the size of each of the four non-vmlinuz files and post back. You've really peeked my curiosity. Also try reformatting the disk to FAT in Kicker>Configuration>Hardware>Floppy Formatter. Something is really not adding up here.

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Sorry, had a bad trial disk in when I read the above. The four non-vmlinuz files total 151 KB with 48 KB left on the floppy so it is a lot tighter than I thought. I guess we're getting to the point as kernels get bigger that we'll no longer have room on the floppy for a boot disk. I think you could probably burn one to a bootable CD if you have a CD burner. Either that or get better compression on vmlinuz but at some point you gotta run out of room on a floppy. Maybe kernel 2.6 will be the one that does it. At any rate, glad I could be of help. Post back if you have any questions.

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pmpatrick,

 

Yes, I have burners and that will probably be the solution of the future. I had to work pretty hard to get the bzImage down to 1mb. Of course just another 350>400 bytes would have been enough, I think.

I'm sure I could come down a lot more if I really understood what it all meant even though they (linus?) do a great job with the help section.

Ran into a few wierd things I made mention of at the tail end of your 'make boot disk tutorial'.

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  • 1 month later...

The reason I changed from RedHat (excluding the KDE3/RH issue) was due to RH7.0. A truly buggy release. I changed and I never went back!

 

Releasing unstable critical software is STUPID. The installer is critical.

 

In work I frequently have to work with a big vertical market software company and the most common complaint is just get the bugs ironed out, forget the functionality and provide incremental patches not complete new versions.

 

Apart from the Mandrake configuration tools and the new Galaxy desktop what really is new? This could have been provided as a simple update instead of a new release.

 

I'm having problems with the looping perl installer. If I didn't have a CPU alarm set it would have fried my CPU. I see from this topic that its a known bug!

 

The whole version release war is crazy.

A suspect a large part in Mandrake gaining popularity was at the expense of RedHat after version 7. Mandrake should maybe have learned from this! (For anyone that doesn't remember it was the release with the cludged glibc versions)

Hardly a trivial library to screw up!

 

The distro's need to slow down and stabilise. I'm not sure the Mandrake wizards are too important, Webmin still works ? The point is some things are critical and should be thouroughly tested. If the installer works reliably on defalut settings then stick and unstable warning next to individual package installation.

 

And like someone else said, listen to the users doing the bug reporting. Even someone doing something through their own stupidity or lack of knowledge is doing something someone else will probably do.

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First time I ever got to hear my CPU alarm.

The system has been running 24x7 for months without a hickup.

 

The Installer has been a nightmare. Switching to a console to see the logs doesn't help when you need to hit the power switch.

 

This is a real pain, I had problems with the 9.0 installer becuase the boxset media were damaged and it wouldn't finish. This is really bad though!

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