unable to install kernel (partially solved)

[Holger Levsen]

hi,

two guesses what your problem might cause:

1. you're using sarge or sid and there are some dependencies broken. (debian 
installer beta3 businesscards iso stopped working the day before yesterday 
for that reason.) - by the way, posting your config, at least, fai.conf, is 
also a good when asking for help.

2. your target host has no internet connectivity and sources.list is almost 
empty. so packages are unknown but exists in  the database because of 
dependencies. can't your installation client reach the internet via a proxy ?
fai clients _must_ access a (partial (watch out: this can be tricky!)) (local) 
debian mirror - but it doesn't matter how ;-) _after_ the installation this 
access can be denied, plugged, whatever.
if you are using a proxy it's a good idea to have a bigger cache then the 
added size of all packages - you will gain a big win in installation speed: 
after the first installation the folllowing ones only take five minutes (on a 
modern system), so you can have 10 per hour to find and fix all remaining 
bugs and issues ;)

good luck, i'm sure FAI will be worth your efforts!

regards,
	holger

Am Freitag, 26. März 2004 05:55 schrieb Alex:
> because my target host had no internet connectivity i had initially
> commented out this line from:
>
> /usr/lib/fai/nfsroot/usr/share/fai/subroutines:
>
>     task updatebase
>
> because it was taking forever timing out from the apt-get operations, as i
> was realise in hindsight i was using a sources.list with internet mirrors
> listed in it.
>
> unfortunately this had the effect of not copying over the
> /etc/apt/sources.list or mounting /usr/local/share/fai directory.
>
> ie generally a bad thing.
>
> i've now fixed the issue by only using a sources.list with local deb file:
> mirrors.
>
> however i've still not quite managed to install a kernel, i'm getting
> dependency problems:
>
> # chroot /tmp/target apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-686
>
> Sorry, but package has following unmet dependencies:
>
> kernel-image-2.4.18-686: Depends initrd-tools (>= 0.1.21)
>
> # chroot /tmp/target apt-get install initrd-tools
>
> Sorry, but package has following unmet dependencies:
>
> Depends: cramfsprogs
> Depends: dash
>          ash
>
> # chroot /tmp/target apt-get install cramfsprogs
>
> Package cramfsprogs has no available version, but exists in the database.
>
> similarly for "dash" and "ash".
>
>
> does anyone have any pointers/suggestions for easily installing a kernel to
> an fai target host. i just want a stock-standard debian kernel.
>
> or how do resolve these dependency issues, etc?
>
> any help to solve the above problem much appreciated.
>
> -alex.