Hi,
I've just had a whole bunch of fun installing on a Dell XPS. The problems sound similiar, but my impression on the Dell was that it was the Optimus graphics that caused the problem- neither Intel, NVIDIA or Radeon apparently have any responsibility (except to users of a decrepit OS), so they haven't made any effort to get the software functional for the hardware you bought. If you google the bumblebee project you'll see the sterling work that has been done to reverse engineer it, and it should hopefully be getting to a distro near you soon. Essentially, new laptops apparently have stuffed graphics due to a closed code powersaving mechanism.
I eventually managed to get it working with a Linux Mint Debian Edition install; with the (pure) Debian
netinstall the best I got was a terminal with V4l driving the graphics.
The Ethernet card I still don't have working. In a rather surprising twist, the wireless works out of the box- go figure (and now that I'm back in my lazyboy I don't have much incentive to figure out the ethernet problem...)
Ian.
>Re: Still can't install wheezy on a 2011 iMacS30/08/11 13:51
>Hi again,
>I was directed to the wiki:
>http://wiki.debian.org/iMacIntel
>Apparently this section has been updated:
>Update (2011/08/12) : aluminium iMac Intel 12,1 / Wheezy , see the
>"video" section.
>However this didn't work for me. Even applying the radeon.modeset=0
>line in the boot parameters just leads to a blank screen with a flashing
>cursor at the top. Booting into rescue mode gives me a
root shell, and
>I applied the suggested updates to /etc/apt/sources.list, but aptitude
>update failed with messages saying the server locations couldn't be
>resolved. I tried a ping to the actual IP address, but got the message
>"Network unreachable".
>So I'm still stuck. I think this could possibly be bug # 627705, lack
>of kernel support for the Broadcom ethernet card. But I'm not sure. My
>installer was a weekly build from a few weeks ago -- should I try a
>later build? I don't want to take the time if I'm just going to end up
>in the same place.
>Cheers, Mike.