Executive Summary:
I didn't use the installer, rather I
debootstrapped on a HDD and then
put it in the new machine. Unlike any
of my previous debian-amd64
installs, everything "just worked".
Thanks
debian-amd64 developers for all of your hard work, as this port
has come a
long way!
A Few Details:
After rocky experiences installing
debian-amd64 on Athlon64 boxen, I
nevertheless decided to use it for my new
computation server. This
machine will be used for various
long-running
computationally-intensive mathematical tasks. The specs
are:
Tyan Thunder K8S Pro (s2882) with BIOS 2.03
Dual Opteron 250
2
GB Kingston ECC/Registered PC3200 DDR RAM
Samsung SP1213C 120GB SATA
HDD
(By the way, the BIOS version may be important here. Tyan's web
site
says that Opteron 250 support was only recently added, but
thankfully
2.03 has this feature.)
I bootstrapped the installation
rather than using a bootable CDROM; my
procedure was:
1) Install HDD
in working debian-amd64 box, partition and create filesystems.
2)
cdebootstrap from alioth
3) chroot and apt-get miscellaneous utilities
(scsi-tools, etc.)
4) compile kernel with hardware support as listed on
debian-amd64 K8
mainboard compatibility list and "safe" options (e.g. no
NUMA)
5) edit fstab and other config files to reflect
predicted
configuration of new machine
6) install GRUB
7) transplant
HDD into dual Opteron machine and boot
8) apt-get more applications,
recompile kernel with "optimal" settings
(SMP, NUMA etc)
The only
hitch was that I left a "/dev/sdb" in fstab that needed to be
"/dev/sda", and
as a result fsck failed on boot. The root filesystem
seemed stuck in
readonly mode, so my solution was to add the kernel
parameter "rw" and skip
fsck on boot. I was then able to edit fstab.
The K8 mainboard
compatibility list was very helpful and all of the
onboard hardware was
supported immediately when I compiled a kernel
with the drivers listed
there. Maybe, though, it would be good to add
a list of XFree86 drivers
for the onboard video where appropriate?
The K8S Pro has builting ATI Rage/XL
which works fine with the "ati"
driver.
Hardware monitoring with
lm_sensors works well but really requires the
custom "sensors.conf" available
from http://www.tyan.com.
So far, I can
definitely recommend this board/CPU combination for use
with
debian-amd64. I will post an update if anything
changes
significantly.
-David
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