On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 12:28:39PM +1200, Daniel Reurich wrote:
> On 15/08/15 12:05, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> >I installed from alpha2, and it mostly worked.
> >Devuan boots up properly, and runs. I'm currently ssh-ed in to another
> >machine where I have my email, accessible via mutt.
>
> Thanks for the report. Was it a standard install or expert-mode and
> was it Jessie, Ascii or Ceres?

An expert-install. I am somewhat particular about the partitioning, and
didn't know whether a standard install would give me the options I
wanted.

And Jessie. I love that Jessie and Ascii are planetoid names!

> >
> >There were a few glitches:
> >
> >(1) it still offered to install the system on my installer USB stick.
> >I wasn't stupid enough to fall for this ruse, and specified my hard
> >drive.
>
> That's odd. I hadn't noticed that... could be a hardware specific issue.

I do remember that if was discussed on either this or the Debian boot
mailing list some time ago. I thought it had been fixed long ago.

> >
> >(2) Going through the steps one by one, I got to setting up MD devices.
> >I made the mistake of asking it to do this. I had no MD devices on this
> >machine, so I expected it just to moce on to the next step, after
> >possibly dong some internal overhead to tell it this had been done.
> >
> >Instead, the screen went blank and stayed that way for a long time (at
> >least ten minutes). For a while the disk light on my laptop blinked,
> >then even taht stopped. I eventually used ctl-alt-F2 to get a console,
> >but a few commands there (such as ps) left me no wiser. I went back to
> >ctl-alt-F1, and after a long hesitation, did control-C.
> >
> >I recovered control, and once again was aat the set up MD devices
> >step. I bypassed it and went on to the next step.
>
> That's really weird behaviour.

Yes. if I ever install this system again, I'll make sure to sskip this
step.

> >
> >(3) The 'configure the package manager' step worked, but the text on
> >that page refers to Debian, not Devuan.
>
> Known issue

Not serious for now, anyway.

> >
> >(4) popcon: The text says it sends popularity stats to
> >http://popcon.debian.org. Now perhaps devuan does not have a popcon
> >server set up yet. In any case, I bypassed this step, lest I
> >contaminate Debian's statistics. Was that the righht thing to do?
> >
> I like contaminating Debians popcon stats... I occasionally check
> their popcon for the devuan-keyring package as a guage for how many
> Devuan installs have been done :-)

Ah! Fun.

How would Debian feel about this, I wonder. popcon seems to handle
packages that aren't in Debian!

>
> >(5) The select and install software step told me it would take about an
> >hour. I went away and did other things, such as laundry. When I came
> >back to the laptop I was faces with the message that this step had
> >failed, and that I could either skip this step or retry it.
> >
> >I retried it and this time it succeeded.
> >
> >What might th eprooble have been? Network congestion? Weird package
> >dependencies? I have no idea.
>
> Most likely a dependency loop that was solved in the second pass.

There's probably no way to track it sown at this stage. Or is there a
installation log somewhere?

> >
> >(6) When it came time to install grub, it told me that my machine
does
> >an EFI boot. That was a surprise to me. It is an ancient XP laptop,
> >and I just replaced its hard disk with a new, empty one before the
> >install (this no WIndows). I did let it install an EFI bootloader on a
> >USB stick (my installlation USB stick, as it happened) and it did
> >something.
> >
> It should only do that if the machine booted the installer from EFI
> in the first place.

Strange. I've never changed the boot method, and it always booted XP
fine, with an MBR-style partition table. I could partition the old
system with Linux's fdisk, and fdisk suffices to show me the partition
table, without complaint.

fdisk even tells me that:

Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.

That's the extended partition that cotains everything Linux. There's a
40G partition in frint if it that may some day contain a coopy of my old
WIndows XP, in case I discover I still need it.
>
> >But the machine booted properly without using the stick.
> OK. That's good.
> >
> >The machine is an Asus EEEPC 1000He, the first of the EEEPC's that did
> >not need any proprietary Linux drivers, and the first that came with
> >Windows installed instead of Linux.
> >
> Nice. How does it perform.

Well enough for everyday non-game use. It doesn't have a really fast
video chip, and flash videos have aleays been the pits. But the new
HTML5 video is OK, and s=things like VLC perform adequately for video.
They didn't when the machine was new, but things have beenn getting
faster and faster as the years passed.

>
> >I installed from the devuan-jessie-netboot-i386-alpha2.iso
> >
> >-- hendrik
>
> Thanks for the report Hendrik
>
> --
> Daniel Reurich
> Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd.
> 021 797 722
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