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 Saturday, April 02, 2005
Olá Gonçalves. és português? or your name is (was) long ago based in Lusitânea? Diz coisas. azuleante.blogspot.com  
  Anonymous Anonymous on April 12, 2005
Why don't you try Ubuntu?
It is Debian-based and user-friendly(though i assume you can manage with user unfriendly distros as well ;-) )  
  Blogger Pierre on July 09, 2005
I tried Gnoppix (or was it Knoppix?), and it kind of scared me away from derivative distros. Reading this didn't help either.

I'm using Sarge now, and aside from my initial installation pains (which were numerous) it seems to be working reasonably well now.  
  Blogger Laurence on August 23, 2005
SUSE is better

http://yahooanswers.blogspot.com/  
  Anonymous Anonymous on March 11, 2006
Thank you for this. My system is running superb now!

Somebody from the Netherlands :)  
  Anonymous Anonymous on August 15, 2006