[Rule-list] Test of the *real* 0.7.0

[Martin Stricker]

First I want to thank you, Devon, for fixing this so *fast*! You do a
really *good* job!

Renaming the previous attempts to 0.7.0-pre1 and 0.7.0-pre2. ;-)

So I saw the message and waited the 7 minutes the download needed. Then
I tied to build the two floppies. I got *lots* of disk errors (did I
mention I hate floppies? ;-) ) So I finally decided to buy new floppies
(the first since about 3 or 4 years). Now I *finally* am able to test
0.7.0.

NOTE TO ALL TESTERS:
If you get the message "You don't have emough memory to run the
graphical installer. Using text install insted" and "This computer has
not enough memory to install Red Hat Linux 7.2" you have a screwed up
updates disk. Throw it away and try a new one.

Now for the test:
linux updates mem=12M worked! Finally, whew! The install took longer
than 0.6.3, so using the custom images on an ISO *does* have a benefit.
The package install took 29:21 minutes (0.6.3 22 min), the complete
install 1 hour 13 minutes (0.6.3 41 min). I installed only the base set,
nothing else was selected. But the latter numbers are not completely
comparable, because 0.6.3 I partitioned with fdisk, this time I used
autopartition which took *ecxtremely* long and made:
/dev/hda1   1  13   51 M ext3 /boot
/dev/hda2  14 572 2201 M ext3 /
/dev/hda3 573 620  189 M swap
While partitioning I saw these messages on console 3:
* Detected 16M of memory
* Swap attempt of 96M to 192M
The latter is the autopartition telling the swap size it tried to
create, but why does it detect 16M of memory when I typed mem=12M? The
box has 160M memory, 2x16M + 2x64M EDO-RAM.

So I looked into console 2 and did a free, which took over one minute to
finish (while the installer was autopartitioning):
        total   used   free shared buffers
Mem:     9984   9196    788      0    2368
Swap:       0      0      0
Total:   9984   9196    788
No swap there yet, it's heavily trying to partition. Don't know what's
*so* difficult about that...
Later I did another free while the packages were installed.
        total   used   free shared buffers
Mem:     9984   9220    764      0    3288
Swap:  193528  37120 156408
Total: 203512  46340 157172

I think it would help very much if we could get yet another disk, this
one only partitions the disk with fdisk to create the swap which then
can be used very soon in the actual install. See the swap thread for
some ideas.

Tomorrow morning I'll try mem=11M. Then I'll be away at a client until
sunday afternoon. Good night!

Devon, about you owing me a beer: I owe you a complete crate of beer at
least for all the wonderful work you did with the installer! Now we
actually have an installer wich works on 12 MB of RAM using just two
customized floppies and the original Red Hat Linux CDs! I'm quite
impressed! And even more impressed I am that between the first ISO
installer and now only six days passed! You announced 0.5-01 on Friday
evening last week, and the working 0.7.0 appeared yesterday evening.

Another question to Devon: Do you think you can alter pcmcia.img in the
same way you did boot.img? Then laptop installs would be possible
(Jason's is waiting...).

Best regards,
Martin Stricker
-- 
Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/
Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/

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