Last night I tried to install Debian 1.2 to my new PC using the boot floppies 1996-12-8. I was going to install the packages over ftp either with dselect or by first downloading them after the initial boot disk install. The installation went smoothly until it was time to configure the device drivers.
I have a 3com Etherlink III (3c509b) ISA card left from my old computer so I selected the 3c509 module from the list of network adapters and went on to install it. First I tried to install it with no parameters and the driver complained that auto-probing the card is not reliable and the installation did not succeed. After guessing some parameters and how to give them I went on without being able to load the 3c509 driver. The rest of the installation went just fine and I got the base system installed. After the first reboot, I telneted from DOS to my linux box at work and checked the modules.txt in the linux source 'Documentation' directory. There was an example that mentioned you can put a line like 'options 3c509 io=0x300 irq=10' in the /etc/modules.conf file. I went on and booted to linux, edited the /etc/conf.modules file and also put a line 'alias eth0 3c509' in it. This did not help. Giving 'ether=10,0x300,eth0' as an argument to the kernel during the boot did not help, messing with plug and play did not help, trying to reinstall and configuring 3c509 with the parameters 'io=0x300 irq=10' did not help. I even tried the io base 0x310 but this did not help either. In short, the 3c509 module failed every time to initialize the card either during the boot or when loading the module. The booting also took really long and it was a pain to try out different combinations. I noticed that there is a Mitsumi cd-rom driver trying to probe something at io base 0x300 and irq11, I wonder if this can disturb the 3com card at io0x300, irq10. Otherwise the installation went just fine. Especially I liked the idea of configuring the keyboard as the first thing. It helps a lot if you don't know the US layout. I also put a hard drive from my old computer to the new one which had the /home partition from my previous linux installation. The adduser(?) program noticed this and made the uid->username mapping right and did not try to create any new directories. Very smart and nice feature. Thanks for any help, // Heikki -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
