[Gllug] Debian hopeless

[Chris Bell]

On Sun 07 Mar, Garry Heaton wrote:
> 
> After years of installing Red Hat and Mandrake without a hitch on one of my
> workstations I recently turned it over to server work and decided to have a
> go with Debian Sarge.
> 
> I'd heard Debian has problems with recent hardware but the machine is 3
> years old so I didn't think it would be a problem. How wrong I was. The
> machine has a bog-standard D-Link DF530/VIA-rhine ethernet card, which has
> been around for at least 4 years, but Debian couldn't load a module for it.
> 
> How does this distro have a hope in hell of appealing to anyone other than
> the "I run my server on an old 386" brigade if it's driver database is so
> far behind the times?
> 
> I loaded FreeBSD 4.9 onto the same machine without a problem. Knoppix 3.3
> was equally painless and that's even Debian-based. Maybe the Debian project
> should be handed over to Klaus Knopper then at least we'd have a decent
> installer and hardware configuration.
> 
> Garry Heaton

   Were you trying to load Debian Woody and then upgrade that to Sarge? If
so, I hope that you used the more recent BF2.4 version, which must be
selected BEFORE you press return for the first time; you need to read the
first screen and use the function keys from the first screen to read the
instructions provided.
    I have come across more than one ethernet card which requires a
completely different driver for different versions of the "same" chip, for
example a chip marked as a 3189 series which might require a via-rhine,
winbond, or other driver. Some, but not all, of the confusion has been
caused by card manufacturers sticking other labels over the chip. This is
not a problem confined to Linux, a while ago I was helping to assemble and
load some M$ boxes, and had several apparent "failures" in the same batch of
ethernet cards.


-- 
Chris Bell

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