For ages I have been using unofficially Woody ‘Net install CDs to get boxen up and running.
Since I am burning down my media laptop today, I thought I would try out RC2 of DI. I have been a bit curious for a while, but haven’t had any boxes that really need a reinstall. So today, I take DI out for a spin.
I downloaded DI at great speed and burned it to a CD, after fighting with CD burning under 2.6.10. (2.6.10-ac10 seems to have resolved my problem. 2.6.7 was working fine too.)
I stuck the CD in my Dell Inspiron 3800. I selected the one time boot menu and booted the CD-ROM. DI came up immediately. I had the option of choosing a 2.4 or 2.6 installation. I manually chose 2.6. Then, installation started.
I was asked some questions about my language of choice and my region. I was also asked about my keyboard.
DI probed for my CD-ROM drive.
It found my Carbus NIC without incident and DCHP succeeded. I was asked for a machine name and it grabbed a domain name from my DNS configuration.
Next we moved into disk partitioning, which was really a treat. Ordinarily I would drop to prompt and partition manually, but instead I gave the partition helper a chance. DI’s partition helper is really quite sweet.
You can choose from a beginner partition scheme with just a partition and swap partition, or you can choose a single or multi-user partitioning scheme. I am fairly specific about my partitioning, so I wandered through the menus a few times until I arrived at a setup I was happy with.
Then something magical happened. I started the Logical Volume Manger (LVM) configuration and, provided you’ve actually read the documentation for LVM2, configured a basic LVM setup with a single VG and LV. I was left with a LV without a filesystem, though, which I had to rectifty manually. I selected ReiserFS which should support online growing and shrinking.
The text graphic showing my partition layout was simply excellent. Characters that reminded me of the old PC DOS game Rogue helped convey meaning. I have to admit I am not entirely sure what they all mean, though. My swap partition and LV have what appears to be, well, a puppy dog icon. I’m going to assume that’s good, since puppies are good. Substitute good for bad if you do not like puppies.
Finally, a base installation was installed on my LVM’s logical volume.
Thereafter, I was prompted to install LILO in either the master boot sector or on my root partition. Or I could choose any device I wanted as an advanced option. I just stuck LILO on my master boot sector, which I might replace with GRUB later.
Last, my installation CD was ejected for me. It was time to reboot.
LILO loads up the system after the reboot and my root partition is picked up off LVM. Very slick. I am pleased.
The box does boot up without a root password, but has no services installed besides Exim4.
The only thing missing from DI is package selection. Now, I must install all the packages I want by hand. Of course, I generally do things this way, so I already know the names of the packages I want. However, a new user would likely be hoplessly lost at this point.
It seems when I booted into the actual installation, the second phase of the install never took place. I should have been prompted for date information and asked to create a user account. Oops.
Other than that, DI RC2 performed great.
I think I’ll try it on my Sun Ultra 5 next.