aquarius I'm having problems installing breezy (or dapper, for that matter)... aquarius yeah, I thought you might say that. In working hours I'm, er, at work :) Kamion tell me about the problem, and if it takes longer than a few minutes to figure out we can do it over a few sessions? aquarius OK. On booting either the breezy install CD or the dapper netinstall CD, I get the nice Ubuntu screen. Kamion netinstall CD? aquarius After hitting enter, it starts printing the startup messages, and then I get segfaults. Kamion oh, the netboot mini.iso? aquarius Yeah, I found a dapper netinstall CD from somewhere. Yep. aquarius The segfaults happen before I get to the first menu. aquarius and then the kernel panics. Kamion ok, I can walk you through narrowing it down a bit, at least ... aquarius It doesn't always panic at the same place aquarius Sometimes it segfaults but then gets to the menu. Kamion does sound like memory trouble though even if (as you said before, iirc) memtest doesn't find anything Kamion or CPU trouble aquarius If I boot from a Knoppix 3.4 CD, when it throws segfaults it dumps me to a shell. Running cp -r <something> <something else> in that shell also segfaults. Kamion basically nothing else of the system is being exercised at that point aquarius So it seems to be busybox... aquarius I was worried that you were going to say it was the memory or CPU. aquarius Any way I can tell which without buying more memory? Kamion is it a separate machine, so you can IRC at the same time? aquarius It is, yep. Kamion ok, use dapper, and boot with BOOT_DEBUG=3 on the kernel command line aquarius and you do remember correctly; I ran memtest. Twice. And it said no problems. Kamion it'll drop you to a shell; exit that one; it'll drop you to another shell Kamion nano /etc/inittab Kamion replace /sbin/debian-installer-startup with /bin/sh, a few lines down; save and exit Kamion exit the shell aquarius "linux BOOT_DEBUG=3" at the prompt? Kamion yes Kamion then you'll get yet another shell; type /sbin/debian-installer-startup at that, see if it segfaults aquarius replace /sbin/d-i-s in the ::sysinit: line? Kamion yes aquarius no segfault as far as I could see aquarius although it cleared the screen Kamion ok, that's expected aquarius and now I'm at another shell, after "Trying to enable the framebuffer". Kamion (one sec, just checking a patch for somebody) aquarius np Kamion ok, now basically you need to cat /sbin/debian-installer and step through it one script at a time Kamion so export MENU=/usr/bin/main-menu Kamion ls -l /lib/debian-installer.d/ Kamion and '. /lib/debian-installer/foo' for each script in turn aquarius ok aquarius all done aquarius They all ran. Kamion all worked? aquarius No segfaults. aquarius No anything, actually. None of them output anything Kamion er ... you should have the menu up then aquarius and I have. Kamion ok Kamion hmm. Does the installer work now, then? :-) aquarius well, one of them output a whole screen of blank lines :) Kamion I suppose it *could* be some weird timing thing Kamion yeah, screenfuls of blank lines are a debconf frontend starting up aquarius hm. aquarius They all worked. aquarius I wonder whether it's something like, I dunno, the memory not warming up fast enough or something? aquarius I'll go through the installer... Kamion strictly, this isn't the same way that the normal system starts, because I didn't get you to replace /sbin/debian-installer with /bin/sh in /etc/inittab as well Kamion so it'll be executing in a different runlevel Kamion this was by accident because I forgot a step in the instructions, but whether this actually makes any difference ... aquarius hm. aquarius Now I get a warning about no kernel modules being found. aquarius (debconf warning, not a crash) aquarius aha Kamion oh, if you're using the dapper installer, you need to keep it really really current aquarius E:Unimplemented function Kamion it gets out of date very easily when we do kernel module-ABI changes aquarius error displayed on screen (a crash-type error, not a trapped error) while choosing a mirror. Kamion anything interesting in /var/log/syslog (tty4)? aquarius How do I get at it? Alt-f* isn't working. Kamion oh, bugger, that's a consequence of the aforementioned runlevel thing aquarius In fact, nothing at all is working. :) Kamion hmm, reboot, go through aquarius restart? Kamion ... my instructions again, except replace /sbin/debian-installer with /bin/sh too aquarius ok, doing it. Kamion and after you run /sbin/debian-installer-startup by hand, exit that shell before running the /lib/debian-installer.d/ scripts Kamion but you should probably grab a new mini.iso first Kamion 'cos the one you've got is out of date and unusable now aquarius dammit, I only got it about a week ago :-) aquarius right, np, I shall get a new one. Kamion http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/dapper/main/daily-installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso is the current daily build Kamion sometimes http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/dapper/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso is newer, but not right now