Guest chad Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 heh, Mandrake 9.1 has been my best mandrake install YET better than 8.1 9.0 or 9.1 rc2 everything was up and working within minutesIf u can't reproduce a bug does not mean that the bug does not exist. A lot depends on how you did the install. Did u choose install and then go for individual package selection ? Yes. I chose individual packages during install and all went well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest chad Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 I have got to the bottom of this. Its a bug of the perl script installer. I will post more details later. And it also explains why I got a freeze when I had installed mdk-9.1rc1. Good job, ndeb! Way to research!! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 chad, Did u do an install or an upgrade of some kind ? Also, when u did individual package selection, did u use the expanded tree list or a flat list ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 So here's the investigative report. Installer freeze during individual package selection Note that I had selected the install option, not upgrade. 1. Once I am on the individual package selection menu, I click on the expand tree button. No problem at this point. 2. Now, if I click on any of the packages, the mouse pointer starts flickering. This is the beginning of trouble. If I click a second time on any package, the graphical display freezes. Basically, the installer display on the console ctrl-alt-f7 freezes. The mouse can still be moved but mouse clicks have no effect. 3. Once the installer freezes, I can still press ctrl-alt-f2 and run top and ps to see which processes are running. I find that the process with PID 9 is /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/runinstall2 -method disk and has taken up 99% of CPU and almost 55 MB of RAM. It stays that way until I use the command kill -9 9 to kill it as that is the only way out. Once this process is killed, the installer unmounts all partitions and says the system is ready to reboot. This means the installation has aborted and I have to start from scratch. How to avoid the freeze ? If in step 2, I do not click on a package a second time and instead click on collapse tree, the mouse flickering goes away. Now, I can toggle between collapsed or expanded tree as many times I want and also click on the listed packages without any problem. I continue the installation until an identical problem crops up at a later stage as described below. Installer freeze after configuring services (summary section) 1. I do system configuration (sound, network, video, mouse, printer etc.). Note that no printer is connected to my system at any time. The installer installs the cups server even though no printer is detected (since none is connected). 2. Then I configure all system services. I make sure that the printer service cups is NOT selected. Then press the next button. The graphical display freezes. 3. I can still press ctrl-alt-f2 and run top and ps to see which processes are running. Once again, the process with PID 9 is /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/runinstall2 -method disk and is found to have taken up 99% of CPU and almost 100 MB of RAM. It stays that way until I use the command kill -9 9 to kill it as that is the only way out. After this I can reboot the system safely. The installation is incomplete at this point. 4. After reboot, I repeat the same sequence of installation steps. I do not format any partition so that the installer simply takes up the previous configuration. After configuring services, this time I can finish installation successfully without any freezes. Just note that I had exactly the same freeze problem with mdk-9.1rc1 (which I have already mentioned in my original post in this thread). Most likely, this is related to printer configuration as in these reported bugs: https://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2479 In order to verify that the freeze is due to printer configuration, I repeated the same sequence of installation steps but this time I did not touch the printer configuration in the summary section. There was no freeze and the install completed at the 1st attempt. So printer configuration is still buggy in the final release. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 Well i installed onto a 750 athlon kept my home partition, did individual package selection in tree and flat list. Quick and easy. done the same on my 1800xp, no problems at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 When I was testing RC1, I reported a bug that was confirmed where I unclicked an OpenOffice package and then received an alert stating it had to uncheck (huge list of pacakges). The alert didn't go away after I clicked the ok button. Then I tried the cancel. Second time I clicked it pretty much froze up the install. Sounds very similar. It was eventually fixed (so they say :) ). I didn't have the same issue in RC2.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 Well i installed onto a 750 athlon kept my home partition, did individual package selection in tree and flat list. Quick and easy.A clean install from an ISO on a hard drive? U have to reproduce the conditions of the installation first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 Well i installed onto a 750 athlon kept my home partition, did individual package selection in tree and flat list. Quick and easy.A clean install from an ISO on a hard drive? U have to reproduce the conditions of the installation first. Oh yeah they were both cd installs sorry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ral Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 Reminds me of my 9.0 installs. Good on one PC bad on another... :( Anyway, will try to be getting a copy this weekend. I like the new look and have been itching to dump RH8.0. Was thinking of reinstalling ML9.0 but with 9.1 so lcose to release I decided to wait. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
83mercedes Posted March 27, 2003 Report Share Posted March 27, 2003 I'm going back to Mandrake9, this always happens to me! I got 9 running perfectly, and just the way I liked it... and thought I could improve on that with 9.1. The install went well, until I tried to rebuild the nvidia source drivers, and they wouldn't build... ended up using textar rpms for the nvidia drivers, which worked great. The 9.1 looks awesome, and seem to work OK for me, but some things I still liked better with 9. And by the way, I've tried 3 versions of wine including the one which comes with 9.1, but no matter what I do I can't run Half-Life or RTCW, which is a minor annoyance, but still my favorite games... so please don't bitch at me about native games...( I got UT2003 as well) Just my opinion here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hippocampe Posted March 28, 2003 Report Share Posted March 28, 2003 awwww man!!! I got some spare partition on my second hd so I tried to install Mandrake 9.1 on that just to try before upgrading my 9.0 install (which is the one I use daily). The install went on perfectly and I was amazed by the appearance. I tried some things with which I had some problems with 9.0 and everything worked OK. At that point I was excited and wanted to upgrade the true install. Now, I tried installing from CD and from disk, it freezes at the same point: just before the packege selection. It just displays something like "rebuilding packages database" or something like that and won't move on. I got to the console and there are two processes with the same name: /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/installer but one with PID 9 and the other 117. the second one takes up like 99% of CPU. after a while, they seem to take around 4% of CPU but the install is still stuck there, no change. :( Come on, I did nothing exotic here!! just a basic upgrade! I'm surprised the installer has such bugs when all my previous install of Mandrake went relatively fine. Oh yeah, and now I can't go back to previous steps like it used to be. Anyone has found a solution to the install freeze problem? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zero0w Posted March 28, 2003 Report Share Posted March 28, 2003 I also encounter the freeze problem ndeb mentioned. This is definitely not a good impression for newbie Linux users :( . I used XFS as filesystem. I manually rebooted after the freeze at completing system service selections. Luckily it got me right into X and everything seems fine... (with XFS it does _not_ seem to check or recover the journal entry like ext3...) Still the installer needs fixing. These freezes are simply not acceptable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted March 28, 2003 Report Share Posted March 28, 2003 hippocampe and zero0w, Thanks both of you for your diagnostic work. I have the same experience and agree that previous mandrake installers (8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 9.0) did not have such catastrophic bugs. Both newbies and oldies will be badly affected by these bugs which crop up in numerous places. One can understand if bugs appear in a running system. But, in this case, its almost impossible to get to a running system because you can't even finish installation. Mandrake needed to do a much better job to stay in business. In fact, they should have called this one a 9.1rc3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted March 31, 2003 Report Share Posted March 31, 2003 Anybody else with similar freeze experiences ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tomb Posted April 7, 2003 Report Share Posted April 7, 2003 Looks like this is the thread I need to jump on. Q: Is there an absolutely guaranteed way to install 9.1? After a totally frustrating experience with the upgrade option, I have done fresh installs on 2 of my 3 linuxes boxes with great success. Now I'm trying to install 9.1 on my workplace linux demo sysyem, a PII-300 w/128M. This has been a great system to show how well Linux works on an older machine. I chose the install option, formatted my / partition and the system now freezes on "looking for available packages". I have tried various options including 'text' 'noapic' and 'nousb' (suggested in other posts) and nothing gets the install moving. I am in the process of reinstalling 9.0 (which is proceeding normally with package install as I write) but I'd like to get all of my machines to the same level. It seems strange that the install worked on my laptop (PII-267 w/64M) but fails on a (marginally) better equipped desktop. Could it be the graphics card? (can't remember what kind but has worked fine in 9.0). Any suggestions will be appreciated. TIA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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