I received an ECS A900 this morning (in the UK its sold by Novatech as the N-Book) and tried to install Debian on it.
First try was to install from the 2.2r3 CD I had (it has a CD drive, but no floppy). This hung just after it had detected the lack of floppy. So I downloaded a BF2.4 ISO, and tried that. This got further, but the box has SIS 630 video, and the SIS framebuffer driver obviously did not like the support chips. So I overrode the boot line with:- linux vga=791 video=vesa and got further. I got a framebuffer with tux up the top, and it powered its was through and put out the message:- Compac CISS driver (version 2.4.5) and hung. >From what I can see the next thing it should be doing is looking for ethernet hardware. This box is supposed to have a RealTek chip in it but as yet I do not know what kind (I will find out shortly). I also had a copy of SuSE 7.1 lying around, so I tried that, and as that does not seem to try to access the LAN hardware, it worked a treat. So at least I will be able to find out what kind of LAN chip I have and whether the driver loads correctly (and which driver) for my next Debian attempt. I would much rather run Debian than SuSE on this box. Any thought welcome David
