Installing Slackware-current I tried to use an USB key as source. It didn't work so I had a look at /dev/tty4. I saw a lot of errors and also a message about pr being an unknown command in rescan-scsi-bus, line 283:In Slackware pr is in /bin, but not in the initrd. Maybe that should be added to the busybox or directly to /bin (not very heavy)?

I don't know if that could explain the other errors though. I'll try to pastebin them.

It does seem like /bin/pr should be added, yes.

I'd be interested in the details of how the USB stick was structured... partitioning, filesystem, and directory structure. And, if it was made using usbimg2disk.sh, if the updated version was used. The previous one mounts the stick at boot which interfered with detection here.

I couldn't grab kernel messages in /dev/tty4 (dunno how to do that?), but at least output of in INSUSB (replacing RDIR=/dev/tty4 with RDIR=/tmp/scan.txt). The USB stick has only one vfat partition with one directory named /slackware64 with the same subdirectories as on the ftp site. I didn't use usbimg2disk.sh, only "cp -r" from a local mirror.

EDIT What puzzles me are these lines:as I don't understand neither why pr is looked at in /mnt nor in /usr/bin instead of /bin. It's late here, I could have a look tomorrow if need be.

Attached Files

scan.txt (11.6 KB, 11 views)

Thanks. I'll make one that's similar and see if I can figure out what's going on.

The installer puts paths under /mnt ahead of the normal ones to try to use the better-than-busybox utilities once they are installed, and for other things like lilo that aren't actually on the installer. At the time INSUSB runs, there shouldn't be anything under there, so I'd expect "file not found" rather than any other kind of error message. Again, I'll take a look at it and see what I get here. Thanks!

To make sure I commented out the line calling /sbin/rescan-scsi-bus in INSUSB: same result, the slackware directory is not found.

But I forgot to tell that I used another (not partitioned) USB key as installation media and noticed that after I run INSUSB the installation key (not the one with the packages) was mounter under /usb-stick. So, it seems that as the installation key is the first listed in $REMOVEABLE_DEVICES but contains no partition, INSUSB tries to munt it as unpartitioned:Mount succeeds, though kernel complains verbosely it can't find any fileystem on the device (which is right), but of course there is no Slackware directory on it, so it says "NO SLACKWARE DIRECTORY FOUND" (In French here :-).

PS the key with the packages is well recognized by the kernel and shows in /proc/partitions as in /sys/block (with removable=1).

PPS. Stupid me: this was caused by an architecture misfit between the installer and the USB key containing the packages, so "mv slackware64 slackware" did the trick. Maybe because in slint I overlooked differences in INSUSB for 32 and 64 bit, or I mistakenly copied one over the other, I will check and correct that then.

PPPS. Yes I had the same (internationalized) file for both archs, my mistake. Messages in both genuine files are identical so no more translation is needed (but maybe a warning could be added, like "a slackware directory was found, but not for the same architecture as the installer"?) Yes, that would complicate things a bit though.