Here is an account of my recent experience with the woody bootdisks.
I have a really old Pentium-based Panasonic CF-25 (I think) laptop. It
was upgraded at some point to 48 MB of RAM, and it has a 4-GB hard
drive. Oh, and it even can do 800x600 with 16 bpp. I got it
essentially for free, and because I don't have a laptop, I thought that
it might be good for hacking code while sitting next to my wife as she
watches TV. There is no CD-ROM drive, but I bought a brand new D-Link
PCMCIA ethernet card, and I assumed that I could just plug it into my
ethernet switch to install Debian over the Net.
Unfortunately, I have, in the end, had only too little success. First,
I tried potato. No good. To my naive mind, the appearance is that
potato's PCMCIA subsystem is too old to recognize the variation on
NE2000 in my ethernet card. I tried slackware, Red Hat, and Mandrake,
with varying degrees of success. Mandrake told me that I would need at
least 52 MB of RAM for a network install. (4 MB short!) What the hell
is up with that?
Anyway, maybe a little more than a month ago, I tried the woody
bootdisks, and everything appeared to work perfectly. I was set. Then
I recompiled the kernel and screwed something up. After letting it sit
for a few weeks, I decided to go with a fresh install. In the mean
time, there were new woody bootdisks uploaded. Now I am back in
installation hell.
As with the earlier woody bootdisks, there is a nice beep, and the LED
on my ethernet card turns on just after I choose to install PCMCIA
support (as the alternate for configuring device driver modules just
after the installation of the driver floppies). And after I configure
the host name, the installation program leads me directly into network
configuration, which means, as I have learned, that "eth0" will nicely
show up if I run dmesg on another VT. A serious problem happens,
however, just after I get the screen asking me what my transceiver type
is. Regardless of whether I leave the default "auto" or even blank the
line, I get a hard-locked kernel ("Aiee", I think) after I press <RET>.
This caused me a good deal of consternation, but I did find a
work-around, after much trial and (mostly) error. I discovered that,
when I am asked whether my ethernet card is a PCMCIA device, if I lie
and answer "no", then the kernel doesn't lock up, and I can proceed
happily to install woody over the Net. And I lived happily ever after,
right? NOT!
Oh, I thought that everything would be OK. I was even able to boot from
the hard drive (but, grrr, only by using the special MBR, but that's
another story). I edited sources.list for woody. I installed X and got
it running. But then, when I rebooted again, "Aieee". Dead kernel. It
dies just after doing the PCMCIA start-up. I suppose that I should use
Rescue/Root to mount the main partition and stick "exit 0" at the top of
the PCMCIA startup script. Even if that works, though, I won't have Net
access.
Hopefully this will be of some benefit to someone. If anyone has
suggestions on how I ought to proceed, then please let me know. I
subscribe to the list.
--
Thomas E. Vaughan (303) 939-6386 Ball Aerospace, Boulder
Ball-internal home page: <http://hypostasis/~tevaugha>
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org