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Hardware is a Intel-board with a P4 640 processor (3.2ghz with HT and 2MB cache), 512MB RAM, and a 80GB SATA disk. Network interface is a Broadcom GLAN adapter.
Installation cannot be done with a standard Sarge netinst cd, because the Tigon3 driver included with the 2.6.8 kernel doesn't recognize the network interface. Tigon3 with a newer kernel does the trick, so I did the following.
- Download the latest daily Etch netinst disk from http://www.us.debian.org/devel/debian-installer
- Start it in 'expert26' mode (it's a bit more difficult to install, but it's easier to skip things we don't want to do
- Configure as you would normally: set up the networking, keyboard, partitions, etc.
- When you get to the question asking about the Debian mirror to use, select one nearby, and choose stable
- When everything's ready (including partitioning), one would normally select to install the base system, but this won't work with the daily build (at least it did not for me). Instead, do a alt+f2, and do a manual debootstrap:
Code:
debootstrap sarge /target/ http://a-close-by-mirror
- When this is done, chroot into the target, and start base-config to do what you always would do
Code:
chroot /target/
base-config
base-config
- When that's done, we still need to install the kernel, so do a apt-cache search to find the 2.6.15 kernel for your system (for mine it was linux-image-2.6.15-1-686-smp), and install it. Double-check to make sure the necessary symlinks and initrd get created.
- Go back with alt+f1 to the menu, and choose to install the bootloader (I used GRUB, but I guess LILO will work as well). It will complain about a step not yet done (install base system), but when you select go back, installation will continue anyway. If you haven't forgotten the kernel installation, it should work.
- Once done, choose to execute a shell (finish the installation doesn't work), do a umount -a to umount all partitions, and reboot the system to boot into your newly installed system.
Some notes though: once installed, you might want to check the sources list so all lines concerning testing are changed to sarge (or stable if you prefer). Also, you might have to run kbdconfig to configure your keyboard as a debootstrap doesn't do that for you.
If there are requests about a full howto for this method, please let me know.
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