Hi,
I have installed Debian dozens of times since 2003 but never ran into any significant problems. I just rebuilt my main home machine with pretty standard equipment including both on-board Realtek eth0 and wlan0 via a PCI card. I had an old Debian 6.03 amd64 netinst disc lying around, and the install of Squeeze was flawless,as was the dist-upgrade to Wheezy. However, I could not successfully dist-upgrade to Jessie so I decided to install using an 8.1 image instead. All of this was done over the wireless card. It should be noted that DHCP worked effortlessly.
The first attempt with the stock amd64 netinst image for 8.1 ran into trouble due to lack of firmware. However I was able to put the requested debs on a USB stick and proceed. However, I could not get my router to autoconfigure either the eth0 interface or the wlan0 interface with DHCP. I tried manually assigning an IP address instead, but still no successful networking when the time came to connect to the mirror.
After consulting this list last night, I tried the unofficial netinst image with non-free firmware from
cdimage.debian.org, and got identical results (except no warnings about missing firmware).
So I find it baffling that the official 8.1 installer fails on the same hardware where the 6.0.3 installer works perfectly. For the moment I am just installing Squeeze with the plan to upgrade to Wheezy, like I did yesterday, and just use that until Jessie has had some more time to get any issues worked out. I always used to run Sid,and I wouldn't mind doing so again if the above issue is recognized by someone here as something that has been fixed in unstable.
Any general ideas would be greatly appreciated, and I would be happy to provide more details if it will help advance the project. I realize this post is somewhat lacking in detail, as I'm hoping that this scenario may ring a bell with someone, so to speak. I'm a surgeon rather than an engineer or anything like that, but I have been using Debian and similar systems for a long time.
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