Prompted by the fine work done by Jeremy Koch, and the fact that SuSE, and Mandrake (plus others?) all have ReiserFS installs, I hacked away at the Debian installer to create these boot disks.
Recent BUGTRAQ notices have shown that ReiserFS does have bugs. My own testing confirms this. Some people have had kernel oops's. I experienced directories that did not go away after being rm'd. Even reiserfsck did not fix it.
User beware with any ReiserFS partition.
Fri Jan 12 08:48:47 PST 2001
The bug is that a directory listing will not display the really long filenames. More information is avaiable from Bugtraq: Message-ID: <[email protected]>
I am informed that patches for this problem exist, however these disks suffer from this bug.
These disks come with no warranty, implied, expressed, or anything, but feel free to use them and to comment upon them.
As of Mon, 1 Jan 2001 23:31:13 -0800, I have not tested the PCMCIA
portions of the installer. I have confidence that they work, but
I have not proved it to my satisfaction.
As of Fri Jan 12 09:01:35 PST 2001, I have had reports that the
PCMCIA portion works.
As of Fri Apr 27 14:48:55 PDT 2001, I have had reports that the PCMCIA
portion failed on a Dell Inspiron 8000 with 3Com Magahertz 10/100 LAN
CardBus PC Card Model 3CXFE575BT.
The disks currently available are based upon boot-floppies 2.2.17.
Download the rescue.bin, root.bin and driver-1.bin disks, and copy them onto floppies.
dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 conv=sync dd if=root.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 conv=sync dd if=driver-1.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 conv=sync
you can also get my base2_2.tgz, (individual disks) or use the Official base2_2.tgz (individual disks).
Pop in the Rescue disk you just made, and reboot.
You will then see the familiar Debian install screen. If this is your very first Debian install, this may not look too familiar. I would urge you to peruse the Official Installation documentation.
The first time you will notice something different, is when you go to Initialize a Linux Partition. You will be asked if you want to make an Ext2 or ReiserFS partition. The prompts are easy to follow, in typical Debian fashion.
If you choose ReiserFS, the next time you will notice something different is after you select the mount point, it will ask if you wish to mount with the notail flag. If you will be using LILO to boot, the partition that holds the kernel (typically /boot) must be mounted with the notail option. (Due to a quirk in the reiserfs code, it must be mounted with the notail option; remounting it will not work.)
Due to another quirk, if you did indeed create and ext2 filesystem, and you are asked about notails, that means that the mount failed. Don't worry: it will fail again and you will have a chance to try again.
The only other big difference is the inclusion of GRUB.
However, to install GRUB, you must execute a shell (either from the
menu or by activating Virtual Console 2). You may then install
the GRUB boot loader as thus:
grub-install --root-directory=/target
<install_device>