Debootstrap/Fedora - Debootstrap/MIPS - Veracruz

Ok, so I finally migrated my client’s server to Debian (from a very ugly Fedora install). The process was mostly painless, but I did stumble upon a couple of details. A quick summary, for those not familiar with Debootstrap. I want to do a nice document later, although my experience was mostly based on Cross install howto for Debian. First of all, a primer for those not familiar with it. Debootstrap is a program that allows for setting up Debian installations within chroot environments - Both the old and the new Debian installer use it behind the scenes to set up minimum workable Debian installations. My first problem was with Fedora’s quite strange kernel. Once I had the debootstrap in place, whenever I tried to chroot into the new system, I got this strange error message:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso' failed!

. Originally, I thought it happened because of some clash between the running glibc and the one in the chroot. Well, I was wrong, turns out the Fedora kernel is compiled to somehow depend on the specific version of the glibc it was compiled with… So I installed the whole system, and when I rebooted with my new root partition, the machine stayed in the limbo. The kernel reported the same inconsistency when trying to start init. Strange… But well, fortunately after sending my own kernel, I had a nice, working Debian system. Enter my other task: The Origin 200. In much shorter lines: I finally got a working kernel (thanks, ths!). After a couple of iterations of generating a ext3 root image on my laptop, and copying it over, I got the system running. I found two exciting R10k processors with a whooping ~160MHz clock. The Linux kernel is not really stable in there. I hope my boss understands the machine is not worth trying to run as a server… I expect it to be a nice toy for me, but not really worthy for the institute. We’ll see. On other news, I am writing this from Veracruz, where I came for Congreso GULEV 2004. We intended to leave Mexico from the Ximian offices yesterday at 16:00 - Gerardo’s car broke down two blocks from there, so instead of confortably going 3, 3 and 4 persons per car, we had 5 per car. Anyway, we got to Veracruz at 22:00. The conference is just starting. It seems it will be smaller than last year, but anyway, some beers are expected to come this way in a couple of hours. Most of the Mexican FS community is here. Some talks are interesting, some of them are just an opportunity to chat a bit ;-)