Xenomachina

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Debian Woes

After my troubles with Fedora a number of friends suggested that I try out Debian. After hearing lots of great things about it, I finally decided to take the plunge. All is not well, however.

First of all, it seems that what was considered bleeding edge for RedHat 9 a year and a half ago is still considered bleeding edge for the current release of Debian stable, aka "woody". When I tried to install it on my machine it didn't recognize the network interface. I my network interface is the 3com 3c940 integrated into my Asus P4P800 motherboard. Luckily I was smart this time, and used a separate hard drive for the Debian install, so that I could fall back to my existing Fedora install if anything went wrong.

After several attempts to install woody failed, I gave up and tried "sarge". It had a problem too, unfortunately. It wasn't able to recognize my CD-ROM drive. This was especially weird, because I was installing it from a CD. In other words, the installer could not find the disk it had just loaded from! After a bit of searching, I finally found a page which had a workaround. Just before the CD detection begins, switch to the other virtual console and execute:

modprobe piix
modprobe ide-generic
modprobe ide-cd
Then switch back to the installer, and it'll detect the CD. This seems to work. Yay!
posted at Saturday, April 02, 2005