Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 108
Boot Image does not support international character sets
Last modified: 2015-11-18 16:04:24 EST
Its kinda silly really, but there IS life outside the US, and we don't all use NLS Codepage 850. UK formatted hard disks use cp 437, but there is no support for this in the installation boot image. This needs to be added, or an international image made available. This only applies do installations performed from downloaded files, UK-written CDs and locally mounted network drivs.
It would be helpful to know how the CD was created and what settings were used to create it. It sounds like the CD may have been burned incorrectly.
The CD was created with Adaptec Toast on a macintosh. THe format used was ISO9660 with Joliet extensions. The hard disk installation (which also failed) is a Win98 machine (urgh!) with FAT32. It is a UK installatio
We do not have any experience with Adaptec Toast application. We use the GPL utility called cdwrite. I feel it may be a configuration problem with the app you are using. Can you try not using Joliet extensions and burn it straight iso9660 with Rock Ridge extensions. Also with hard drive installs, if it is having difficulty finding the directory on the FAT32 partition, we know this to be a problem and are working on finding a solution. Possible work arounds for this are using a boot and rescue disk and mount the vfat partition, make sure that they rpms directory is capital RPMS not lowercase and make sure the redhat directory is RedHat.
Unfortunately Adaptec Toast doesn't write Rock Ridge CDs so I can't try that. I'll try to get hold of a new package on Monday and see what happens. With regards to the hard disk installation, the installation program fails because it cannot find the NLS support for the disk... the RPMS directory is named in upper case and the redhat directory is spelled with a capital R and H. I'll try the boot and rescue solution later and post the results.
Hard disk installation from the UK Win98 machine failed again with the same message. Booting to the rescue set and trying to mount the Hard Disk resulted in "Unable to load NLS Charset cp437(nls_cp437)" Trying to load the CD resulted in a failure to load iso9660 extensions - the rescue set does not seem to have support for CDs.
The current architecture of the installer does not allow us to make the loading of nls codepages easy. We've changed this for the next release.
Does this mean that international customers cannot install 5.2 from a hard disk image?
Debian provides official CD images that you can download and burn onto CD-R's. I can point a Win95 user with a CD writer to Debian and say "download this image file, rename it something.ISO, burn it onto a CD-RW, and boot from it." The Win95 user then does all this and says "Wow, I never imagined it was so easy to install Linux." OK, maybe I'm paraphrasing liberally here, but you get the point: burning a bootable Debian CD is literally two drag-and-drop operations from a web browser to local hard disk to a CD writer under Win95. Needless to say, such convenience is conspicuously missing from Red Hat's FTP site. ;-)
Matt, have all codepage issues been resolved? If so, please close this bug.
This was fixed in the errata boot images for 6.0, IIRC.