[Rule-list] Test of 0.6.3-small - the whole story

[Martin Stricker]

Test system:
Intel Pentium MMX 166 MHz
160 MB EDO RAM (2x 16 and 2x 64)
Asus mainboard
Matrox Millenium 4 MB graphics card
Soundblaster 32 AWE sound card
no network (yet)
56k modem
2.4 GB Western Digital hard drive (E-IDE)
10x Teac CD-ROM drive (E-IDE/ATAPI)
Benoit, if you need any other information just ask.

All tests are performed with a 128 MB swap partition.

I first tested with mem=10M. It froze somehow while showing
starting anaconda...
Happily Red Hat provides four consoles ( switching as usual, [Alt][Fx] for
x=1 to 4). The first is the install console, the second shows a minimal shell,
the tird and fourth show different information on what the box currently
does.

Console 3 shows (in extracts):
7972 kB are available
going to insmod (several kernel modules on several lines)
looking for usb controllers
no usb controller found
(detecting several other hardware)
looking for USB mouse...

Here the install hangs. The really weird thing is I don't have any USB in my
computer (heck, it's five years old!), and at the beginning the installer
correctly detected this. Why does it look for an USB mouse now? This might be
the point where the install really hangs. Is it possible to do an if/else and
schecking for USB mice only if there *is* an USB controller? This might be
worth a bugzilla entry, but first I need to check if it also happens with stock
Red Hat Linux 7.2 CDs. Maybe this evening...

Console 4 shows (only the end):
<4>(several messages concerning raid)
<6>md: raid5 personality registered as nr 4
<6>Journaled Block Device driver loaded

Here the inbstall hangs. It furiously spins the CD and the hard disk over
and over again, always with exactly the same "melody". This kept driving me
nuts so I turned the box off after half an hour.

To determine which of the two messages (on console 3 versus console 4) is
displayed last I ram mem=10M several times, switching heavily between these
consoles (they are accessible when "running install" is displayed). The USB
message is the *last thing* the installer outputs. It appears about 20 seconds
after the Journaled block device one. The heavy and repeated noise on the hard
disk and CD seems to suggest a loop in the block device driver, but the USB
message appears last, so it might be the real culpruit.

I Then tried mem=11M. It hung with the same noise "melody", so I quit after
a few minutes, it really drove me into madness...

Finally I tried mem=12M which worked quite nicely with RULE 0.5.3, but here
it got trapped at the same place as below! Devon, did you change somethimg
here? I'll have to check if 0.5.3 also looks for an USB mouse... It was the
same noise than before, but not completely repeated, sometimes there was an
additional noise. So I hoped and waited and tried to shield my ears against that
horrifying noise... The console messages were exactly the same as with 10 MB.
After about 10 minutes it really went past  this stage and continued
booting! console 4 gave no additional messages, but on console 3 appeared
Detected 16 M of memorv
Very weird! Then I went on with the install. Deleting the old partition was
easy, but after I told "fdisk" (wich got me some GUI for the real fdisk I
wanted) to create the new partition the install hung for another four minutes.
Within this time console 3 got this message:
Swap attempt of 96M to 192M
which didn't do anything visible to the size of my swap partition (128 MB).
After that (and the activation of 128 MB swap) all went nice. Again I
installed only the base install, nothing else. This time, as promised by devon, mo
unresolved dependencies popped up.

Really weird is the installation progress: It told me I'm installing 111
packages, using 244 MB disk space. And in the beginning it thought the whole
install would take just 4 minutes... ;=D

Then it copied the installation image to hard disk (which wasn't there in
0.5.3 and is part of anaconda/Lepto's capability to install from everal CDs).
Now I got this error message which wasn't there in 0.5.3:
WARNING not all packages in hdlist had order tag
Then the install finally begun.

While the installer copied the packages I went to console 2 and entered
free:
           total       used      free     shared buffers
Mem:    9984      9196     788      0        3068
Swap: 133048  11824    121224
Total:  143032  21020    122012
So the tolal RAM (total plus buffers) is 13052 which equals 12.75 MB. I
don't know where the additional 0.75 MB are comming from. Any ideas?

The package install took 22 minutes, about the same time as with 0.5.3. The
complete installation from turning on the computer until it rebooted took 41
minutes, definitely longer than 0.5.3.

Booting into the system with mem=12M went fine. df reported:
1k Blocks   used       available   used
2329540   155825   2055380      8%
The discrepancy between the total and the used plus available are the 5%
security space to prevent users from filling the disk. Interesting side note:
The installer told me it'd install 244 MB, but only 152 were used! Weird
again...

That's my story. Devon, Benoit, if you have any questions or any suggestions
on how to perform the next tests don't hesitate to ask! Benoit, I'd like to
help with setting up a test plan if you are interested.

I just grabbed the new floppy images. Devon, would you please be so kind to
include the full RULE installer version number on any later file names so I
always know which Version I'm testing? Oh, and which version did I download
right now?

I'll ry a 11 MB or 10 MB tomorrow while I'm at work (which means my computer
at home has about ten hours to get anaconda starting). Maybe it eventually
does...

Best regards,
Martin Stricker

-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/

GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet.
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