Quoting Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>:
Please try to install the 'testing' suite (work in progress for Debian 6.0 'squeeze') using the installer from <http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/>. This will install a newer kernel version (2.6.32) which might include a fix for this bug. Even if you are sure you want to use Debian 5.0 'lenny', this will at least tell us whether a bug fix exists.
Here are the results from my attempt to install *netinst testing squeeze Alpha 1*.
Without 'noapic', the newer install did not stop at the "MP-BIOS bug" error message, but did advance to the language selection screen. But it was impossible to select the language, as the keyboard did not work.
With 'noapic', the install proceeded to completion. However, the language/locale selection was strange in that if I selected English as the language, I was only able to select the locale from a list of English-language countries. This does not make sense. I could very well be a native speaker of English residing in a non-English-language locale. Or, I could simply prefer to use English at the installation stage - if there is a problem in the screen "Tee pakettienhallintajärjestelmän asetukset", say, then how do I file a bug report if I don't know how that phrase was written, originally, in English?
The installer finds the Fedora 12 that I installed earlier and promises that that OS will be bootable in addition to the Debian one. However, when I next restart the machine, the GRUB menu does *not* have an entry for Fedora. There are only Debian entries - 4 of them, in fact.
OK, I select the top entry. But... I cannot log in, as the Welcome screen does not accept me either as a normal user or as root. I have now done the installation - all of it - twice, to make sure I did input the password(s) correctly. But, well, no luck.
I will note that I have, successively, installed OpenSUSE 11.2, Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 on this machine. They did have problems, yes, but I could still log in. Also, the Debian install seems to have made the Fedora 12 installation unbootable. A pity, as it was working pretty well this morning.
Sakari Aaltonen