Subject: Some initial problems

From: Jens Peter Lindemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 10:04:53 +0200

Hello,

bored of the rubbish that slackware blows on my disk, I looked for an
alternative - and found debian.

Yesterday I tried to install the base-disks from buzz-fixed/binary-i386/disks
(feivel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de).

I ran into some problems which are not mentioned in the FAQs I found...

The problems seem to have started when /root/.configure got the control:

- I misspelled the password for the user acount I was asked for. Result: A broken
  useraccount and a request for another useraccount. This is not realy a problem
  to me but it's ugly and maybe very confusing to newcomers...

- The $TERM Environment-Variable is set to "con80x25" on my system which caused
  dselect to print an error-message and exit - no possibility to install
  additional packages... (Error-Message something like "Error opening terminal:
  con80x25.")

The second problem is still there - I can't get an editor, dselect or similar
unless I set&export TERM=linux manually. And - worse - I can't find where TERM
is set to the confusing value.

What did I do wrong?

Jens Peter.

---

From: Martin Alonso Soto Jacome <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 18:44:55 -0500

Jens Peter Lindemann said:
> ...
> - The $TERM Environment-Variable is set to "con80x25" on my system 
> which caused dselect to print an error-message and exit - no 
> possibility to install additional packages... (Error-Message 
> something like "Error opening terminal: con80x25.")
>
> The second problem is still there - I can't get an editor, dselect or 
> similar unless I set&export TERM=linux manually. And - worse - I 
> can't find where TERM is set to the confusing value. 

Bruce Perens answered:
> This is a symptom of an antique kernel. Are you running Debian 0.93? 
> Debian 1.1.4 is on our FTP site ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/stable . 
> Did you change the kernel in some other way? 

I upgraded my Slackware at home to Debian 1.1, and experienced a similar 
problem.  Indeed, what was causing the TERM variable to be incorrectly set was 
the fact that I was still booting my old 1.2.13 kernel from Slackware instead 
of the new 2.0.0 from Debian.  That happened because I kept many of my old 
Slackware files in the system, and even after the installation of Debian, lilo 
continued booting the old kernel (I actually rerun lilo, but because of a 
mistake from my part it didn't reinstall the boot sector).

I'm not sore this is Jens' case, but if so, the solution is just to configure 
lilo apropriately so that it boots the new kernel.

Hope this helps,

M. S.
------------
Martin A. Soto J.                           Profesor
Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Computacion
Universidad de los Andes      [email-masked]

---

From: "Susan G. Kleinmann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 10:04:22 -0400

Hi Jens --

> (feivel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de).
[snip]
> - The $TERM Environment-Variable is set to "con80x25" on my system which 
> caused dselect to print an error-message and exit - no possibility to install

I looked at the bootfloppies scripts, and think this may be the correct
explanation of your problem:

I suspect TERM is set to con80x25 in the kernel.  I found it being reset in
dinstall, which comes on the Debian boot disk and root disk.  (You mentioned
the base disks, not the boot and root disks, but I assume you also got the
boot disk and root disk. ?)

The script dinstall looks as if it sets TERM to linux if you choose Color 
installation just after you've inserted the boot disk.  It sets TERM 
to linux-m if you choose Monochrome installation.  It doesn't set TERM 
at all if you choose neither, but simply to continue with the installation 
without specifying either Color or Monochrome.

Then TERM gets set to linux again when you "configure" the system.  This 
includes: 
-- writing /etc/root.sh to /target/root/.configure, 
-- writing /etc/setup.sh to /target/sbin/setup.sh,
-- configuring the keyboard (which is where TERM is set to linux), and
-- configuring the timezone.

If you chose neither Monochrome nor Color installation, and if you somehow 
interrupted the process while you were setting up your keyboard, then 
linux would have remained set at the value given in the kernel.

HTH,
Susan Kleinmann

---

From: Jens Peter Lindemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 10:45:38 +0200

> boot disk and root disk. ?)

Yes, I have. I chose Color-Install from the initial root-Disk menue and followed
the NEXT-Menuitems most of the time - means: I initialized&mounted the swap
Partition that is used by my slackware-Installation, too. I initialized and
mounted (as "/") one of my linux-native Partitions and followed the
install-procedure up to the point where lilo is going to be installed. At this
point I left the installation-procedure and added the new root-Partition to my
slackware-lilo.conf (and ran lilo).

As far as I understood the initial contents of my debian-root-partition, with
the next boot-time root gets automatic-login on the first virtual terminal (via
inittab) and /root/.profile starts /root/.configure - right?

> without specifying either Color or Monochrome.

I repeated the installation-procedure to avoid posting a false-alarm to the
mailing-list. Both times I chose color - and both times TERM was set to
"con80x25" when .configure called dselect :-(

> linux would have remained set at the value given in the kernel.

The most disturbing thing is now that I have to set TERM to a valid value
manually even after configuring the system.
Where is this variable set on a correctly conifgured debian-linux-system?

Jens Peter.