Install report (Fujitsu Lifebook S6210)

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 12:39:44AM +0000, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> No problems launching the installer, except for figuring out how to get
> this machine to boot from CD (special boot menu on F12, which is a nice
> idea). The zebra stripes at the beginning of the installer are kind of
> funky.

That's a temporary logo, of course.

> I see laptop-something and mdsomething are installing and then I get a
> failure message saying that some packages could not be installed and
> telling me to retry or exit with a potentially unstable system. There's
> no way to find out which packages it means. The box tells me I could "go
> back" to the select and install packages step.
> 
> Other people have noted that asking people to "go back" to a step they
> never went through is odd. The striking thing in my case is the name of
> the step I was asked to go back to. It is the *system*, not I, which
> selects and installs packages. I am taken back to the install menu,
> which is sitting on the "select and install" step. If I select this, I'm
> *still* not asked to select any packages, it just immediately retries
> installing (and fails). So it's a bit odd using the word "select" in
> this context, since there doesn't seem to be any way to do an actual
> selection. The selection is hidden and is only exposed by this one word.
> 
> Anyway, obviously releases won't have this failure so this is an
> exceptional install path.

Right. Still, the whole error path is ugly; it makes sense for Debian,
but since we've changed the package selection around it doesn't make
sense for us. I've just uploaded base-config 2.44ubuntu5, which drops
you into aptitude instead of failing (note that this is only a
better-than-the-alternative fallback, and won't happen on release), and
removes the confusing text you mention. That will also get rid of most
of the other problems you experienced.

Of course, fixing the packages would help too; hint, hint. :-)

> elmo told Andrew on IRC that a couple of the evolution packages were
> failing in this daily and that I should exit and use aptitude to install
> the ubuntu-desktop task.

The problem with exiting is that base-config loses the opportunity to
configure the MTA and do various other finish tasks, including starting
gdm. Executing a shell from the menu, running aptitude from there, and
then returning to base-config is a better approach; but none of that
should be necessary now.

> I configured postfix first, a few dialog boxes there that might confuse
> people I guess ("smarthost"?).

Those won't be shown at high priority, and you'll no longer be dropped
to medium priority if the ubuntu-desktop task is uninstallable, so
that's effectively fixed.

> dpkg takes a while to do this, and the screen goes blank during the
> process. Of course, I'm outside the installer now, so I don't know if
> this would have happened without the failure.

It wouldn't; base-config turns console screen blanking back on as one of
the last things it does.

> and sudo asks me for my password every single time I use it on the
> command line. I can kind of appreciate why this might be good (far
> more consistent than being asked 'randomly' -- ie after 15 minutes)
> but I'm not used to it. There's always "sudo -s" though.

This is controlled by the timestamp_timeout line in /etc/sudoers; use
'visudo' to edit it.

Thanks for your report,

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]