[RULE] Observations on a test install

[James Miller]

Am now installing RULE just as a sort of test.  Someone wanted me to test
out some hardware for them, so I threw together a 486 dx2 80 with 16MB RAM
to test the hardware and fiddle with RULE a bit.  I had trouble with the
installation documentation.  In general, I think too much attention is
paid to explaining general computing concepts (e.g., drive partitioning)
and not enough to the particulars of the way a RULE install goes.  I used
Slinky, btw.  I did finally figure out how to start the process.  The
hangup was where the first boot disk sort of dumps you off in no man's
land: the message is something like "waiting for enter to start /bin/sh .
. ."  I just wasn't sure what to do here.  I was expecting it to ask me to
insert the second floppy.  After waiting a bit, I decided to hit "enter."
Well, after that, I was left off in more familair territory - a bash
prompt.  I know how to use bash generally and am familiar with Busybox
(Basiclinux uses this in place of the full bash).  But again, I was not
sure what to do: I guess I was expecting more feedback from the console.
Looking over the install documentation again, I decided I needed to ype
/scripts/setup.sh at the bash prompt.  After this, installation went more
smoothly and, at least for me, intuitively.  A couple of problems I would
like to note are: 1) at a certain point you are asked "which device would
you like to use for installation?"  This is ambiguous.  I had to guess
whether this was asking the location of the installation media (logically
this is how I would read it) or the device onto which the installation
will be made.  I think this should be rephrased "to which device would you
like to install RULE?"  To my thinking, this eliminates the ambiguity.
Anyway, things went pretty well after that til it actually came to the
point of installing packages from the CD.  All packages failed with
errors, not installing.  Worrying that I had maybe chosen a bad CD drive
for this installation, when I rebooted I mounted the drive from the bash
command prompt and checked the contents.  It mounted and I was able to
inspect the contents.  I decided to leave it mounted and continue with the
install.  This time it seems the packages are being found and installed
properly.  However, when the time came to insert the second CD, I could
not eject the first one.  So that install failed as well.  Third time I
did *not* manually mount the CD, but the installation routine did find it
and the needed packages, which it installed pretty much ok.  It was able
to eject the disk this time so that I could insert the second CD.  This
third installation attempt seems to have been successful.  There was only
one error message about a disk read error on the CDROM: I don't rule out
the possibility that this CD drive may be a bit punchy, and that this may
be why the first install attempt failed.  But it does seem to have
installed successfully this third time.  Now that I've confirmed that the
hardware I was testing this on works ok, I can proceed to a real install
on one of my other machines :) .

James


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