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Re: PCMCIA issues installing potato on an old laptop



> Hi folks,
> 
> I originally posted this to debian-user, but was advised to repost it
> here.

I have a curious thought, which is sneaky but probably should work.
Since once upon a time a slink install obviously worked fine ... install
slink base (plus apt, if you had to tag for it seperately) *only* - ought
to be lots smaller than your fully usable setup.
	reboot
	adjust apt to point at woody/unstable
	apt-get update && apt-get install console-apt
	adjust apt to point at potato/stable
	use console-apt to pick things in reasonably sized chunks
		so you don't overflow your new /var/cache/apt area.

I've done this myself with pretty good success.  One time I went even
further and symlinked /var/cache/apt/archives into an, ahem, much larger
space while I did the upgrades.

It's a lot slower than just reloading your selections list (gotten via
	dpkg --get-selections > /mnt/floppy/oldpicks
... and loaded anew via 
	dpkg --set-selections 
:> ) but, it does have the advantage of being a bit controllable.  Also
we've a lot more packages than we used to, maybe of several that do similar
things you want to try a new one, so you'll have the freedom to read the
descriptions and "go shopping".

If console-apt bombs out on you, run apt-get update and then launch capt
again (capt is console-apt's real name)... if it does it *again* use 
	apt-get install <packagename-that-you-just-tried>
since it probably has some rude message for you (dependency resolution
usually).

* Heather Stern * star@ many places...

> ----- Forwarded message from Damon Muller <dm-debian-user@empire.net.au> -----
> Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 15:01:20 +1100
> From: Damon Muller <dm-debian-user@empire.net.au>
> Subject: PCMCIA issues installing potato on an old laptop
> To: Debian User List <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
> 
> Hi gang,
> 
> I have an old 486 laptop, an NEC UltraLite VERSA, with 8m of RAM. Up
> until today I'd been happily running bo (I think, a few releases ago
> anyway) on it, mainly using it as a dumb terminal so I can lay in bed
> and read my email. For a while I'd wanted to upgrade it, mainly because
> I wanted a DHCP client on it and there is now no-where you can get
> packages for the old version. 
> 
> I wanted to do a fresh install, mainly because there is so little HD
> space to use apt to install. Also because I wanted to resize the swap
> partition.
> 
> Anyway, I can get most of the way through the install, and PCMCIA card
> services recognises both my pc card modem and network card. This should
> be a good thing, as I need to install it over the network. However, when
> I tell it to use DHCP to get an IP address, it says something like:
> 
> Hw address write mishap
> 
> (something like that, it scrolls away too quickly), then the screen
> fills up with the following:
> 
> eth0: Mismatched read page pointers  1 vs  0.
> 
> And repeats ad-nauseum until the install program times out and kills it.
> The same thing also happens if I try to anything network-y manually,
> except I can't kill it.
> 
> I know this card works with debian, as I've been using it with an older
> debian on the same machine for a long time (years, probably). I have
> never had a problem with it before. cardmgr recognises the card as a
> `Danplex EN-6200P2' if that helps anyone, and it's using the pcnet_cs.o
> and 8390.o modules.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> cheers,
> 
> damon
> 
> -- 
> Damon Muller              | Did a large procession wave their torches
> Criminologist/Linux Geek  | As my head fell in the basket,
> http://killfilter.com     | And was everybody dancing on the casket...
> PGP (GnuPG): A136E829     |                      - TBMG, "Dead"
> 
> 
> 
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> 
> -- 
> Damon Muller              | Did a large procession wave their torches
> Criminologist/Linux Geek  | As my head fell in the basket,
> http://killfilter.com     | And was everybody dancing on the casket...
> PGP (GnuPG): A136E829     |                      - TBMG, "Dead"

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