Re: 9.1 install comments

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>      The amd64 binary distribution sets are distributed as
>>      gzipped tar files named with the extension .tar.xz (e.g.,
>>      base.tar.xz).
>> Are they gzipped or xzed?
> Good point, what is the proper word?

If you want a generic word, maybe "compressed"?  Personally, I'd just
use "xzed" or "gzipped" or "lzmaed" or whatever.  (Perhaps fortunately,
"compressed" means "compress(1)ed" so seldom nowadays that it *can* be
used as a generic word.)

> They can be extracted with "tar xzf $file" on newer NetBSD, so many
> users will not notice the difference.

The major case where I expect it to make a difference is when trying to
extract them on a system old enough it doesn't support the compression
scheme in question.  I'm not sure that's enough of an issue in practice
to be worth worrying about, especially since sysinst can handle the
compressed tarballs.

>> - I was operating on serial, and it didn't recognize mterm as a
>>    terminal type.  8.0 recognized mterm; was it unreasonable of me
>>    to expect 9.1 to?
> Which medium did you boot?

I'm fairly sure it was amd64/installation/cdrom/boot.iso, burnt to a
CD-R.  You say

> The ISO install should know about mterm.

so I'll retry; it's possible that was during a previous, failed,
experiment booting from something else, though I don't recall any
successful installer boots from anything else.

>> - I was trying to use MBR partitioning, [...]  I tried to specify
>>    start=8, but sysinst wouldn't let me; it overrode that to 2048(!)
>>    silently(!!).
> Please file a PR for this with MBR / disklabel / disk size
> information and a short description of the path you used through
> sysinst.

Will do.

>> - I couldn't even _try_ to get the sets from the install CD, because
>>    it refused to mount the silly thing.
> Can you describe this more detailed?

I'll have to redo the install, but I'll be doing that anyway for the
above, so I should be able to go into more detail.

> Standard case is you boot from the CD and it already is mounted as /
> - so no further mounting needed.

Then perhaps the problem is that it's trying to mount it when it
shouldn't be?  It was complaining about a mount failure.

>> - When asking for a DNS server while configuring the network, it
>>    seemed to think I was part of Google; [...]
> You certainly can enter local IPs there (and normally wouldn't even
> specify that if you did DHCP).

Yes, I did enter a local IP there.  (I don't know what happens with
DHCP; I don't use DHCP on my house network.)

> Not sure what the problem is here.

Perhaps NetBSD doesn't think there is one.  It's an issue for me for
NetBSD to be recommending, even to that mild an extent, the use of a
third-party organization that makes a business of data harvesting and
privacy invasion.

>> - When transferring the sets from my house NFS server, it appears to
>>    have drunk the *iB koolaid.
> It invokes the standard base system ftp client (combined with
> progress).

Then I guess the issue is with them.  Again, NetBSD may not consider
this an issue; I do, so I noted it down.

>> - The timezone selection menus appear to be completely unusable
>>    without arrow keys.  This really should be fixed, especially for
>>    serial-line use.

> To quote the sysinst welcome page:

>  In the following menus type the reference letter (a, b, c, ...) to
>  select an item,

And that works fine for most menus.  The timezone menus are unusual in
that they do not have reference letters displayed, and typing letters
doesn't do anything as far as I can see.

> You can use < and > instead, but that is (AFIK) not documented.

It is documented, actually (another respect in which the timezone menus
are unusual), but those move by page.  If the timezone you want isn't
the one the active line lands on when you page back and forth, there
appears to be no way to select it without arrow keys.

> Why did arrow keys not work for you?

Oh, they did work for me; I noticed it because use of arrow keys is not
my default.  But, especially on a serial line, it seems to me that
requiring arrow keys for it to work at all is a bad idea, so, once I
noticed it, I recorded it.

> I often install via serial, use "rxvt" as TERM and my arrow keys just
> work.

Mine did too, once I switched terminal emulations.  (If it had accepted
mterm, I would have had no arrow keys and would have had to restart the
whole install because, as far as I can see, there's no way to switch
terminal types mid-install.)  Fortunately, I was using a terminal
emulator on another machine, rather than a real serial terminal, so I
*could* switch emulations.

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