daily iso test Ubiquity crashes at step 4 of 6

[Richard Birnie]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Trying to do testing of daily iso build for Kubuntu i386 desktop iso for 25/03/2007
test system is HP pavilion notebook N5472
1Ghz Intel Celeron CPU
256MB RAM
20GB Hitachi HDD
md5sum for the iso checks out OK. I have burned the iso twice, once at 10x and once at 4x, same results with both disks. Both disks pass the 'check CD for defects' test. Both run fine as a LiveCD, able to launch applications browse the web etc. When I try to run the installer I get the same result both times. The installation process goes through (very slowly) until step 4 of 6 when it tries to start the partitioning tool. The progress meter ticks up to 100% with message reading 'detecting file systems'. this process takes about 20min+ to complete. Then after another 20min I get a window titled 'Installer crashed' and a box with a traceback in it.

At this point the system locks up completely and I get no response from mouse or keyboard. So I can't grab the traceback or the syslogs. If anyone can tell me how I'll happily reproduce the error and grab the info. I'm aware that 256MB is not a lot of RAM to be running a LiveCD/Graphical Installer, on the other hand the download page does list 192MB as the minimum so this should be at least theoretically possible.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Could you at least retype the traceback for me? I can't necessarily do much with it, but I can do absolutely nothing without it ...

Sounds like a kernel problem, to be honest, but we'll see.

[Richard Birnie (rbirnie-deactivatedaccount)]

Here's the traceback, sorry I don't know why I didn't just type this earlier

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/frontend/kde-ui.py", line 1339, in
watch_debconf_fd_helper_read
   self.debconf_callbacks[source](source, debcof_condition)
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/filteredcommand.py" line 176, in process_line
   return self.dbfilter.process_line()
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/debconffilter.py", line 268, in process_line
   widget.subst(question, key, value)
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/components/partman.py", line 228,
in subst
    self.resize_min_size = self.parse_size(value)
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/components/partman_auto.py", line 81
in parse_size
   (size_int, size_frac) = num.split('.', 1)
ValueError: need more than 1 value to unpack

That's all of it. I'm still trying to get the log files. If you need more info just ask

[Richard Birnie (rbirnie-deactivatedaccount)]

managed to get the logfiles.

[Richard Birnie (rbirnie-deactivatedaccount)]

and syslog

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Aha, thanks, that's great. That pins it down as bug 95400, for which I recently uploaded a fix, so this will be sorted out in time for the final Feisty release.

The slowness is probably a kernel bug of some kind, but I'm not an expert there, and unfortunately the syslog doesn't seem all that informative (though I'm not an expert there).