Cannot install via netinstaller
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Hey all,
Recently I have been needing to install a full disk encryption setup on another machine and I had to use the netinstall ISO to properly partition the disk the way I want it to. Usually the installation process would go through nicely, however I have been getting warnings to say that bash was corrupt and it needed to retry the download. I thought this was because of a mirror issue, so when the installer allowed me to go through an option again, I changed the mirror to Trisquel's own (archive.trisquel.info), then through HTTP, then through dotsrc (HTTP) again, and still had the same corruption warning.
I am not sure if this is an issue on my end; I can rewrite the netinstall image on a USB with signature checking when I get back to my home (since my main PC is there) and see if I can get it working from there.
Since the maximum attachment size is 2MB, I can’t attach any images and copying the logs will be a burden as I can’t paste the logs (I am on a mobile device) so I can give important details that you may want.
Regards,
holeinwall
Hi there,
this seems to be a bug in debootstrap (which is used by the installer). Some .debs in Trisquel repo use SHA512 checksums, but a few (including bash) — don't. See for yourself in [1] (look for `Package: bash').
[1] https://archive.trisquel.org/trisquel/dists/ecne/main/binary-amd64/Packages
It seems debootstrap erroneously attempts to verify the bash's .deb against the checksum of the previous package in the list [1]. Hence the error.
A workaround is to force debootstrap to use SHA256 instead (which is also secure enough and appears to be present for all packages). Once booted into the netinstall system, open a console (e.g., with Ctrl+Alt+F2) and modify the `/usr/share/debootstrap/functions' to replace the following line
SHA_SIZE=512
with this (indentation does not matter).
SHA_SIZE=256
You can use nano to make the edit.
nano /usr/share/debootstrap/functions
Ctrl+w can be used from inside nano to locate the relevant line.
Alternatively, you can use sed instead of nano. Sth like this (untested) should work.
sed -i 's/SHA_SIZE=512/SHA_SIZE=256/' /usr/share/debootstrap/functions
Either way, once the file is edited, the installation should go as usual (Ctrl+Alt+F1 takes you back from the vtty console I suggested earlier).
This might be obvious, but… keep in mind the edits are only in RAM. The installation medium is not written to and you shall need to apply this workaround this each time you perform an installation.
Thanks! Looks like it works, it’s gone past the bash corruption warning and hopefully I can have a fresh installation tonight. It is a bit sad that you have to do this hacky workaround every time before you can install the base system, but if you’re using the netinstaller you were probably already expecting a hacky workaround…
I just want to note that you’ll have to wait further in the installer in order for debootstrap to initialize its files in /usr/share/debootstrap, around when you choose the full name for the account after the installer bootstraps a bunch of stuff (this makes sense because I guess debootstrap does that bootstrapping work, obviously, and needs to initialize then as it hasn’t been already).