[Hamara-devel] debian-installer/ubiquity good things which should be in an installer but aren't.

[shirish]

Hi all,

First of all filed a python-support wishlist bug for debian-installer. 
This is/was surprising that debian-installer has no python-support. Also 
seeing the fact that Ubiquity is written in python, was thinking that 
some of the code would have been backported to debian but that doesn't 
seem to be the case.

Did come across some interesting bugs which I think should be supported 
in hamara-installer .

The first one in the list is -

bugs.debian.org/784661 - There hasn't been any update on it but 
surprised to see WD's green drive has failures

For informational purposes, almost all the hdd's available in the market 
since 2k11 are 4k, this is on one of my older desktops -

[$] sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda 
                                                            [22:50:03]
smartctl 6.4 2014-10-07 r4002 [x86_64-linux-4.2.0-1-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (AF)
Device Model:     ST1000DM003-9YN162
Serial Number:    S1DC5K41
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 061a41fe6
Firmware Version: CC4B
User Capacity:    1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 27 22:50:07 2015 IST

==> WARNING: A firmware update for this drive may be available,
see the following Seagate web pages:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207931en
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223651en

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

The interesting part is

Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical

So next time I format this system, would probably do 4k so that no 
offsets are needed and both logical and physical are same.

Also interestingly I found this -

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=251422 - dunno how 
ubiquity solves or has solved this issue.

Also saw bugs.debian.org/370398 , at least a single run before 
installation should happen. I have seen and experienced quite a few 
messy installs because of corrupt memory and there is no way to know if 
there is a corrupt memory till you don't run memtest86+ . This should be 
happening before you start the main installation because if you cannot 
trust your memory, you cannot trust anything. Machine memory is 
designed/works similar to human memory so you can see what can go wrong.

Similarly is badblocks which is used to find badblocks before you write 
on an new/old system.

bugs.debian.org/239911

And lastly bugs.debian.org/763573

which is about a year back, it talks about gdisk which marries or brings 
about both UEFI and GPT (advanced format) together.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org