where to ask about problems with bsdinstall in 9.0RC2?

[Edwin L. Culp W.]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:27 AM, William Bulley <web at umich.edu> wrote:
> According to Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> on Tue, 11/22/11 at 23:48:
>>
>> Sorry William, this arrived not long after I crashed, 18-hour odd time
>> difference .. I've since seen Frank Shute advise how to csup from 8.2-S
>> to RELENG_9_0 and in your case that's likely the easiest way to go.
>
> Sorry about the time difference - not much I can do about that...  :-)
>
>> As you see, you got exactly the same error I got with BETA1, and for the
>> same reason - bsdinstall isn't running newfs on your existing partitions
>> before trying to extract the distribution.  I thought that was going to
>> be fixed before release, but clearly not yet.  It really needs the newfs
>> toggle option of sysinstall/sade before it'll be useful as sysinstall.
>>
>> The docs are very much a work in progress.  Even sysinstall requires you
>> to at least enter the mountpoints for your existing partitions (within a
>> slice); they're needed for install and of course to build /etc/fstab.
>>
>> In my case, wanting to preserve /home, seems I'll have to NOT supply a
>> mountpoint for that partition in order for it to be left alone, and then
>> add it into fstab afterwards, probably having to merge any newly created
>> user there from /usr/home, revert the symlink etc.  Messy.
>>
>> Did you try running sysinstall (or sade), just to do the slicing +
>> partitioning / newfs'ing from Live CD mode, only on DVD1 I guess?
>>
>> In your case I think a source upgrade and building is probably the way
>> to go.  In my case, my 8.2 is on another slice (s4), but I want 9.0 on
>> s2, over an existing 7.4-RELEASE, because that slice has enough space
>> for a decent ongoing 9.x system, and because I'd hoped to contribute to
>> debugging bsdinstall - but then I moved and had no net access for nearly
>> a month.  Still, I'm persisting with that plan and I'll keep hassling
>> until this regression in functionality is fixed, for 9.1 now I guess.
>
> The third time is the charm!
>
> I was successful (and am now running 9.0-PRERELEASE!) with the upgrade
> of this older Dell laptop.  The first (failed attempt) was from 8.2-S
> to 9.x anything (turned out to be RC1 at the time).  This was a source
> upgrade (csup/buildworld/installworld) but failed during the compilation
> of the kernel.
>
> At this point I decided to just grab the DVD1 and install over my 8.2-S
> since I was not invested in anything on the disk (although I had csup'd
> the ports tree and was running Xorg successfully at that point).  The
> DVD1 ISO install of 9.0-RC1 was unsuccessful due to the oddness of the
> bsdinstall program as you describe above.
>
> At about this time RC1 was transitioning to RC2, so I decided to grab the
> bootonly RC2 ISO and yesterday ran into the same bsdinstall issues.  So
> I was forced to try the source upgrade again, hoping that by this time
> the kernel compilation problem had been fixed.
>
> Well, evidently it was, because the csup/buildworld/installworld method
> worked like a charm and I am now happily running 9.0-PRERELEASE.  Thanks
> for all the replies and suggestions.  I am going to try to avoid using
> bsdinstall like the plague and I advise others to do likewise, at least
> until it becomes more mature.  It seems to me that the inclusion of the
> bsdinstall program as the default installer in 9.0 is illadvised at best.
>
Amen.  I share that opinion.  I have never had problems or even been
confused with the old installer and have used it since the beginning.
I have heard that  pcBSD has a great new graphic installer and thought
it was going to be included in releng_9 but it seems as though it
isn't.  I understand that you can use it for FreeBSD through the pcBSD
dvd but haven't looked at it.  If anyone likes it and has a link to
some basic docs, it would be great if you would share them.  If not, I
personally prefer the old one as an option, if possible.

ed
> Regards,
>
> web...
>
> --
> William Bulley                     Email: web at umich.edu
>
> 72 characters width template ----------------------------------------->|
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>