non-install report

[Hank Barta <hbarta@gmail.com>]

I've been trying to install some flavor of Debian AMD-64 to a system I
upgraded last night with little success.
Hardware
    Abit AV8 with VIA K8T800 Pro/ VT8237 chipset
         SATA/RAID (not in use yet)
         VT8237 IDE
         Audio (AC-97?)
    3400+ processor
    512MB/1GM RAM
(recycled hardware)
    Some year+ old Seagate ATA drive - 130GB
    Ancient #9 video card (S3968)
    Ancient Tulip Ethernet card
    IDE CDROM burner

Trying any of the ISOs that looked like they made sense (anything save
the netboot) the system was horribly unstable. It ranged from
rebooting instantly when hitting <return> from the boot prompt to
locking up while loading modules from the CD or partitioning and
formatting the hard drive. It did not recognize the on board LAN so I
put the Tulip card in. It recognized that but DHCP did not work and
manual configuration resulted in lots of error messages to the
console.

(Incidentally, it was not clear which ISO I should be using. I
typically do a network install since I'm on cable Internet.  The
HOW-TO points to two sites for boot images and there are a variety of
ISOs with no description save the name to explain what they are.
Puzzling to me, the directory
http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/debian-installer/current/cdrom/
contains no CDROM nor any indication if I am supposed to build one
from the files found there.)

The machine was so horribly unstable - crapping out ad a different
place nearly each try - that I thought that there was some problem
with the hardware. I tried booting a recent Knoppix CD and it seemed
to work a *lot* better, though it was not without problem. It
recognized the on board LAN and sound with no problem, but configured
my serial mouse systems mouse as a PS/2 mouse. (There is probably a
boot option to fix that, but I didn't bother. A text console was fine
with me.) It did also report once that KDE could not start due to
insufficient RAM (with 1GB available. ;) and once when running a
command at the shell prompt, I got a "bus error."

I ran the Knoppix memory test since last night and it reported no errors.

I'm in the process of installing Sarge i386 and have just finished
rebooting. So far it is running flawlessly.

So, I'm wondering how to go about installing one of the 64 bit Debian
flavors. do I identify my hardware and build a kernel with only
support for it? I presume that some driver that doesn't belong is
leading to the instability. then it's DFS for the rest, right?

Suggestions and comments welcomed!

<back to my ia32 install :( >

thanks,
hank

-- 
Beautiful Sunny Winfield