Re: systemd woes continue

It's been a year or two since I last tried to install the experimental 
debian alpha image on my DS10L, and my abiding memory of the last 
attempt was banging my head against a problem with creating BSD 
disklabel on the ide hard drive due to fdisk being updated a few years 
prior to remove the older functionality of BSD disklabels and the 
instructions not having been updated since then, and the people I asked 
for help had simply been updating their systems instead of doing fresh 
installs.  The BSD disklabel is required for SRM/IDE systems, and this 
system will dual boot from two separate drives alongside a functional 
VMS install.  I did eventually get the disklabel written using an old 
version of fdisk through a process I've since forgotten.

It's on hold for the moment as I tried to run a Gentoo install on the 
drive a few hours ago and it appears that the drive is dead, so I'll 
need to buy a new drive before I try again.

On 7/11/2019 11:11 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi John!
>
> On 7/11/19 2:48 PM, John Blake wrote:
>> I have a DS10L 617mhz and I can't figure out which version is the best to attempt to install on it.  I'd rather avoid things like this issue with systemd where they obviously haven't tried to actually test it on an alpha processor, but I have no problem with recompiling things as necessary (although I would like to avoid the Gentoo path of recompiling everything).
> systemd works the same way on my Alpha XP-1000 as it works on my Intel boxes.
>
> I assume you are talking about the non-functionality of a separate /usr partition,
> but this is something that isn't guaranteed to work well on Linux, no matter whether
> one uses systemd or any other type of init daemon.
>
>> The other question I have is whether or not someone has fixed the issue with fdisk on the system, because I remember the last time I tried to install linux on the system in question, it wouldn't format the drive with a BSD partition as was necessary and after some discussion on some mailing list or another it was discovered that the required functionality had been phased out of fdisk a few years before, and nobody had noticed on either side that it made it impossible to follow the given directions on the FAQ/wiki.  It was still being automatically included with the distro and at the time I had to burn an ancient stable version just to put the partition table right in order to install.
> debian-installer doesn't use fdisk (anymore), it uses partman. Did you try any of
> the recent installation images, see [1]. Please note these images are currently
> shipped without proprietary firmware.
>
> Adrian
>
>> [1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2019-07-07/