Neil Gunton wrote:
Thanks again for all your help, it's been most illuminating! Seems like
every time I think I have linux down pat, then I try to do something on a
new machine and have to spend a week just getting the hardware working...
Linux, it's always good for your humility!
Neil,
You've probably already thought of this, but after years of building
installing Linux on unsupported disk controllers, I've given up on
attempting to build custom driver or installer disks to support the
new hardware.
These days, as soon as I find out the controller is unsupported, I
just pop on old, small IDE drive off the shelf into the system and
install the OS on that. Then, of course, it's a simple matter of
building a custom kernel, booting to single user mode, and copying the
OS from the temporary IDE drive to the SCSI drive.
One nice thing about Debian is that after the initial installation,
you can easily upgrade to new versions without every going through a
reinstallation. Last I looked, RedHat, Fedora, and SuSE require
reinstallations to upgrade to new versions.
Kevin