Today I'm going to...

[Ari Rahikkala]

... emerge debootstrap and do a few other things, and perhaps my life will become less frustrating.

For starters,

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/usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch i386 sarge /mnt/debinst  ftp://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian

. A couple of minutes, and it has installed the base system. Copy /etc/fstab over (/etc/resolv.conf apparently got copied automatically), and chroot in. Set they keymap with dpkg-reconfigure console-data. Get the Internet connection up with pppoeconf. Write a few lines in /etc/network/interfaces to make the LAN work, too. adduser, then base-config new, and... hm, apparently you need to mount devpts first, though the documentation doesn't say anything about that. Discouraging. Ah well, now it works, and it says fun things...

The Debian package management tool, apt, is now configured, and can install 17753 packages.

.. and then it somehow breaks again, messing up the terminal. Ah well, through a little trial and error I find its pty, so I can

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reset 2>/dev/pts/13

to fix it, and apparently go on normally. I go with the predefined selections for now - going through 17753 packages in dselect is not my idea of a pleasant way to install an OS. Then again, I've already hit two bugs in a supposedly stable release, one of which took Googling to fix and the other one an understanding of the concept of terminals as they work in Linux to work around.

The progress indicator hovers somewhere around ten minutes, now somewhere around nine, and goes down in a somewhat stable way. That's only for downloading, though, I think - unpacking and configuring this stuff will take a while longer... It's not impressive the way Gentoo's method is, but it's efficient and feels right. I'll read a book for a while - I bought What does a Martian Look Like? and it seems like a good catch.

OK, it's done downloading everything, and... my god, I shouldn't have chosen "medium" when I was asked how much questions the package configurators should ask me. This takes an insane amount of hand-holding. As if it wasn't enough that exim wanted me to provide a full exposition of exactly how I want my mail server on this system (I don't even want a mail server), now it even wants me to provide the PCI id of my graphics card for xorg... of course it's trivial to lspci to find it out, but I can't understand why the package wouldn't be able to handle something that simple by itself.

Hm... actually, I take back what I said, partly. The configurator does provide a default, which is the right PCI id - it's just afraid to go ahead and assume its guess (which is backed by quite a bit of detection logic built into xorg, as far as I know) to be right without a confirmation from the user.

Here's a more interesting question... should xorg use the kernel framebuffer driver for switching video modes? The dialog says that enabling the option is the safe bet, but the default choice is "no"... hm... just for the sake of experimentation I'll go with "yes", that's the way I didn't do it before.

perl is spitting out some warnings about the locale... that's harmless but ugly. I'll handle it later.

I wonder if there already are things that are confused by sysfs not existing... I didn't remember to bindmount it into to the Debian environment.

Binding portmap to 127.0.0.1 only? Nah... I'll bind it to all interfaces but use hosts.deny to protect it from the big bad world. I've already used this box as a NFS server, after all, and I'm likely to have to do it again.

Everything related to postgresql apparently failed to install. I'm not going to need that for anything in a couple of months.

base-config is done. I expect to boot into the new system soon...

[Ari Rahikkala]

Down into the smoke test I descend...

[Ari Rahikkala]

This stuff would work a lot betterif /lib/modules actually contained something, aye?

[AngelGuardian93]

*blink blink. Blink blink.*

[Ari Rahikkala]

Menoparaiso

[AngelGuardian93]

*head explodes*