[Gllug] Getting Debian Etch to run on an old (EPIA 800) Mini-ITX

[Mike Brodbelt]

John Winters wrote:
> Chris Bell wrote:
>>    Have you sent a bug report? The current schedule is shown as (final?)
>> fixes to be available ready for RC2 release March 19 2007
> 
> No.  I'm not sure it's reasonable to send in a bug report which would 
> consist of little more than "Etch won't install on my machine".  I feel 
> I need to accumulate some clues as to what is wrong first, but I've run 
> out of ideas.  The thing now re-boots so fast that I don't have time to 
> do any diagnosis at all.

Try booting from Knoppix, chrooting into the installed Etch system and
then building your own kernel for it. If it subsequently works on that,
then you can submit a but report on the kernel package. You can even get
the Debian source, and then go through the patches/options until you
find the problem if you want to spend some time on it. I have an EPIA SP
that boots fine with Etch and a 2.6.20 kernel, and an EPIA PD with Sarge
and a 2.6.17.11 kernel, so I can't believe there's anything
fundamentally wrong.

The VIA Samuel 2 CPU advertises itself as a 686, but doesn't do CMOV and
a couple of other things, so I wouldn't be at all surprised is this is
the Etch installer putting a 686 generic kernel on your machine, which
then tries to use non-implemented instructions. If that is the case,
then the Etch installer really needs to detect the Via CPUs with more
precision.

Mike
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