JeOS (hardy alpha 4) installation fails @ "Select and install software" stage

[Mike Frisch]

I am attempting to install under VMware Server 1.04 build.56528 running on Windows XP Pro using the Alpha 4 release of hardy-jeos-i386.iso.

The installation proceeds as normal until the stage when it attempts to install software.

The error message displayed on virtual console 4 is "in-target: Couldn't find task standard" (see screenshot #2)

[Félix Velasco (felix-velasco)]

I'm having the same trouble when installing alpha4 on a VMware Server 1.04 running on a debian server.

It's a show stopper, the installation cannot be completed

[Félix Velasco (felix-velasco)]

Also affects Alpha 5. Testing can't even begin if we can't install it.
Is there any scenario where Jeos hardy can be installed under VMWare?

[Félix Velasco (felix-velasco)]

As dankegel suggested in bug #183910, the problem lies with pkgsel. In its postinst script, lines 78-79, it checks for the existence of the
/usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d directory, and then iterates its content. The trouble is, the code fails when the directory (as in jeos) is empty.

[Félix Velasco (felix-velasco)]

Bug is solved upstream, in pkgsel0.17, by changing line 79 of the postinst script to

 for script in `ls "$partsdir"/* 2>/dev/null`; do

[Bjorge Dijkstra (bjd)]

In addition to the fix mentioned above, I also had to comment out line 162 in /var/lib/dpkg/info/pkgsel.postinst (the call to tasksel) to get the installation to complete.
I'm not sure what it was supposed to install at that point, but it seems to work fine this way.
This was with a commandline system install in vmplayer 1.0.1, have not tried it with regular install.

[johnleoZ (jlz-novia)]

The bug fails to build the sources.list.
I was able to continue the installation process further down the line.
Then I was able to copy /etc/apt/sources.list.apt-setup to /etc/apt/sources.list and then proceed with apt-get update.

[Nick Barcet (nijaba)]

Confirmed here also using yestesday's build of Hardy Jeos. Install fails on:

Mar 17 11:47:48 in-target: Couldn't find task standard
Mar 17 11:47:48 in-target:
Mar 17 11:47:48 in-target: tasksel: aptitude failed (100)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This sort of thing is controlled by ubuntu-cdimage. Rejecting the Ubuntu task.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Hmm, actually, I tell a lie; we could fix this with a seed tweak to arrange that tasksel only tries to install this task if it's available. I'll sort this out.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

As a side note, while Félix Velasco is correct that there was a bug in pkgsel, it was purely cosmetic; all it did was produce a confusing log message. Although it appeared next to the failure in this case, it was not actually its cause.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package tasksel - 2.70ubuntu4

---------------
tasksel (2.70ubuntu4) hardy; urgency=low

  [ Ante Karamatić ]
  * Fix Makefile error handling *-desktop.preinst scripts that would cause
    problems if we ever had more than one script in info/ (see LP #164837).

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Use a repository to speed up updates of tasks from multiple seeds.
  * Update Ubuntu tasks from seeds, resulting in the following changes:
    - Rename edubuntu-desktop task to edubuntu-desktop-addon.
    - Add mythbuntu-live task.
    - Add ubuntu-standard as key package for standard task (LP: #189013).
    - Add ubuntu-dvd-live task.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:19:15 +0000