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[osj@passepartout.krukan.com (Kv237)]

Hello,

I have about 18 years of experience as a Linux and Unix user and system administrator, but after an attempted upgrade about five weeks ago with Ubuntu to their Dapper Drake version i ran into serious problems and the installation essentially crashed.

I have therefore decided to return to the Debian distribution, since this distribution is very stable in my experience. I have decided to try out the AMD64 distribution of Sarge, despite the fact that this version is only in testing at the moment. The installation image work a lot better than any other Debian or Ubuntu installation I have tried out on my computer.

My problem is that the network drivers don't support my ethernet hardware. My moterboard is an ASUS K8N4-E Deluxe. The eterhet adapters I have attempted to use is a Marwell 88E81111 Gigabit Lan PHY included on the motherboard, and a D-link DFE-530TX.

I have attempted to use the forcedeth driver explicitly, but the version delivered with the ISO don't recognize my hardware.

I have tryed to use the Linux drivers delivered with the DFE-530TX, but they are delivered as source code and the ISO don't contain the development environment.
I have attempted to install the drivers from a CD with apt, but the ISO image don't have apt.

I have attempted to install the drivers for the Maxell HW with dpkg, but the ISO don,t have dpkg either.

I attempted to install dpkg into ram memory with the start a shell option in the install image, but dpkg is as far as I could find out only available as a .deb file which requires dpkg in order to install.

I attempted to find an old ethernet adapter today, in order to install the AMD64 port of Sarge. But the only card I could find was a Zonet ZEN3200 adapter. This adapter requires the driver rt18139.o, and that was not available in the ../kernel/drivers/net directory. And before you ask, I did look for a .ko extension as well.

Currently I have no idea about how I could install Debian AMD64 without help with the drivers and with the current kernel image, i.e. Linux 2.6.8-11-amd64-generic.

Could somebody help me by creating a new install image, with the kernel replaced with the latest stable kernel and the latest forcedeth drivers replacing the versions in the current image. I will be happy to try it out, and will of cause report any problems to this mail list.

I will scan this mail list for answers. Thank you in advance for any help provided.

With my best regards,

Sören Jonsson, Sweden
MSc in Computer Science