Debian-Installer errata

Errata for lenny release beta1

This is a list of known problems in the lenny Beta1 release of Debian Installer. If you do not see your problem listed here, please send us an installation report describing the problem.

Disk devices may change on reboot
On systems with multiple disk controllers, the kernel/udev may assign a different device node on reboot of the system than was used during installation due to difference in load order of drivers.
This can lead to failure to boot the system. In most cases this can be corrected by changing the bootloader configuration and /etc/fstab, possibly using the rescue mode of the installer.
Note however that this problem may occur again on subsequent boots. Fixing this issue has priority for the next release of Debian installer.
Use of relatime mount option not yet possible
Support for the relatime mount option was added, but is not yet usable because busybox' mount command lacks support for it (#460824). This has been fixed in daily and weekly built images.
Buggy routers may cause network problems
If you experience network problems during the installation, this may be caused by a router somewhere between you and the Debian mirror that doesn't correctly handle window scaling. See #401435 and this kerneltrap article for details.
You can work around this issue by disabling TCP window scaling. Activate a shell and enter the following command:
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling
For the installed system you should probably not completely disable TCP window scaling. The following command will set ranges for reading and writing that should work with almost any router:
echo 4096 65536 65536 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem
echo 4096 65536 65536 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem
General issues after reboot because of UTF-8 default
The installed system is now set to UTF-8 by default. However, not all applications properly support UTF-8 yet, which may result in minor or major problems when using them.
Please check if such problems have been reported yet and, if not, file a bug report against the relevant package (not the installer).
Graphical installer
The graphical installer still has some known issues (see also the Installation Guide):
  • some non-US keymaps are not fully supported (deadkeys and combining characters do not work)
  • touchpads should work, but support may not be optimal; if you experience problems, you should use an external mouse instead
  • limited support for creating encrypted partitions
  • should work on almost all PowerPC systems that have an ATI graphics card, but is unlikely to work on other PowerPC systems
KDE and Xfce CDs also install GNOME
This is due to a change in tasksel for which we've neglected to update the tools used to build CD images. It is possible to work around this issue by booting the installer with an extra option: install desktop=kde, or install desktop=xfce.
The problem has already been fixed for weekly built CD images.
i386: kernel oops during installer startup on ThinkPad T41
Until we update to a newer kernel, we can't be sure it has been fixed. It seems to be a problem with the kernel, not the installer, though it was initially reported as an installer bug report. For reference check #470522.
powerpc: various issues
The PowerPC port has several issues in this release:
  • installation from floppy on OldWorld PowerMac is broken because no device node is created for the swim3 module and as miboot is not included
  • the snd-powermac module is no longer loaded by default as it will lock up some systems; you will need to add it to /etc/modules manually
s390: unsupported features
  • support for the DASD DIAG discipline is currently not available
  • support for LCS network interfaces is no longer available