[Herefordshire] Debian install

[John Hedges]

Hi Andrew

> I have just got some CDs that Box kindly burnt for me containing Sarge.
> The Woody set I have does not work on this new motherboard, and the
> drives are not rekognised.

I'm surprised woody doesn't support your motherboard. I can imagine it
might not support some new features but the basics should work. SATA is
definately supported.

> Anyhow I am running the Sarge install with
> the linux 2.6 kurnel, thus am starting the install at the boot prompt by
> typing in ``linux26''.  Anyhow I then get to the point where it does a
> hardware check and it explains that there are kurnel modules missing and
> I should probably use a Debian mirror to get the files.  Not good on
> this 64k connection.

Kernel modules are relatively small so 64k shouldn't be a problem here.

I held off upgrading to sarge until broadband arrived because
sarge is in a permanent state of flux and upgrades frequently run to
many 10s of megs. Woody only needs upgrading when security fixes become
available but it is, unfortunately, a little behind the times. It is
worth the extra hassle to get a more up to date system but you could be
spending a lot of time downloading.

> Anyhow I go past this and get to the point of
> detecting my Ethernet controler, again it can't find this.

Strange, what NIC are you using? Have you a Knoppix handy? If so you can
run that and make a note of the modules it uses for your various
hardware.

> I can go
> ahead and do the install, (it can even see the SATA disks!), but I am
> not really happy about doing this at present since all the warnings I am
> getting explain that the install will probably fail on reboot if the
> modules are not found.  Does this error mean that I have stuff on this
> system that is detected but is not available on the CD, or are files
> missing from the CD itself?

If you can get a base system installed it will boot up, but you may not
have all the necessary drivers. The stock kernels come with a fairly
comprehensive set of modules so unless you have got very esoteric
hardware it should 'just work'.

Once you've got a base system installed you will be able to precisely
track down any problems rather than relying on terse installer feedback.

If the correct modules aren't being located you can have a poke around
with lspci and/or discover to find out which ones you need.

Cheers

John