[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hipster 2020.10 text installer ISO Wow!!!!

[Peter Tribble]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 3:45 PM Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss <
openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:

>  OK I just made several attempts:
>
> First attempt was with 2020.10 GUI install ISO. That was forced to
> maintenance mode and was unable to locate libpcidb.so.1 when I ran prtconf
> -v.
>
> It completely ignored the 2019.04 USB image even with it selected via F9.
> The 20202.10 text ISO also fails for lack of libpcidb.so.1
>
> I'll patch the libpcidb.so.1 failure when I have some time. I think that's
> more productive than making a 2017.10 USB image to test.
>
> Unfortunately, this is another example of poor QC of the release ISO
> image. How hard is it to verify that all the libraries needed in single
> user mode are actually installed? A shell script to do that should be an
> integral part of the process for building an ISO image.
>

Only you're not even in single user mode at that point. The dropping to
maintenance mode failure indicates that the ISO has failed to boot; in
particular
it hasn't mounted /usr, which is loaded from the ISO later. This usually
indicates
that the OS can't find the CD at all. (There's a very minimal subset of
files from
/usr on the root filesystem that are actually needed to boot.)

I've seen this failure to find the CD drive on laptops fairly often, they
have a habit
of wiring up the CD drive rather oddly. Also my Dell desktop couldn't see
the CD
at all while it was in the fake raid mode, i had to disable that to get it
to work at all.
But that failure to be able to locate the CD is the likely root cause of
missing libraries,
it's nothing to do with release engineering.

Both OmniOS and Tribblix don't have this failure mode as they don't have the
split boot. We just get the bootloader to slurp the entire OS into memory.
It's
the sort of trick that isn't really practical for the GUI boot, though.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/