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Installing Debian (Sarge, 64 bit) on AM2 platform fails



Hello!

Earlier this month AMD released their DDR-2 platform AM2 for regular users. So I got myself some hardware to build me a new server (to last a good few years ;-))

MB: Asus M2NPV-VM
proc: AMD Athlon 64, 3000+, Socket AM2, Boxed
RAM: Kingston KVR533D2N4K2/2G, 2048 MB, DDR2, PC4200, 533 MHz, 2 modules
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Special Edition, 40 GB, 7200 rpm, 8 MB cache, ATA100
HDD: Western Digital WD5000KS, 500 GB, 7200 rpm, 16 MB cache, Serial ATA300
Optical: NEC-1300A CD/DVD writer, leftover after an upgrade of my desktop system
case: Antec 3U25EPS550XR-2, with 550W PSU

Last Thursday I got my stuff and assembled the hardware. That took the better part of about an hour. From that time onwards I'm trying to install Debian Sarge for 64 bit AMD systems on my new server, but it fails again and again. I tried the netinstall CD first: network not recognised. Then I downloaded 13(!!) CD's from the image.debian.org site but discovered I didn't have 13 blank CD-recordables! Fortunately I got jigdo to work (for the first time I've been using Linux, about 5 yrs now) but by then it was Sunday, very early in the morning :-\ Jigdo managed to build me the 2 DVD's I just couldn't get downloading it from the forenamed site (failed on both Mozilla and wget), using the CD iso files I'd saved. Bad luck: I replaced the NEC writer on my desktop because it failed to recognise some DVD's in the first place... :-\ So I inserted the netinstall CD for the 10th time, but now I had the system scan CD's I burned on a CD+RW disc. That took hours, erasing and reburning the various iso images on that disc. I gave up after the 4th disc.

However, with those 4 disc's and some loose .deb's I managed to set up the basic requirements for installing the latest nVidia drivers, who require bin-utils and the kernel-sources with their dependencies, so I could get the network to work. Installing the sources for 2.6.8 went smoothly after that, but the modules from the nVidia driver failed to build, complaining about 'not being the correct source for the running kernel' (2.6.8-k8 or similar) Oh well, then I'll build a kernel from scratch myself (2.6.17, latest from kernel.org). No problem building the kernel and the modules, but after that I got stuck as I didn't have the initrd-tools to make an initrd image for that new kernel. The initrd-tools require cpio, which requires libc6 >=2.3.5 but I only have 2.3.2 as most recent available.

Basicly, I'm stuck now. Any idea's? Perhaps getting the forcedeth drivers to recognise the NVIDIA GeForce 6150 + nForce 430 chipset? I've managed to update my pci.ids file but to no avail. Any help would be much appreciated!

Regards, M.V. Wesstein
the Netherlands

PS: I've got the hwinfo command to work, but as I have no way of getting that file from the server to the desktop I'm afraid that wouldn't be of any help. Mind you, on my server there is no X-Window system available ;-) And the hdparm /dev/hda command also fails: 'operation not permitted' while logged in as root on the cli...

links: http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=101&l3=0&model=1169&modelmenu=1
http://pciids.sourceforge.net/



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