This would be my first address to the debian-user mailing list, and I did as thorough of a search as I could manage before posting my question.
I'm currently running into a problem with installing debian with my ASUS A7A266 motherboard regarding an "AT Keyboard not present" error. My current RedHat 7.2 installation behave(s|d) normally during installation and typical use, and so I never noticed a problem before. Now I've been enticed into trying out debian, and I've found that the installation process cannot detect my keyboard. (I'm assuming based on the research that I've done it has something to do with the ps/2 controller and the linux kernel). Building a new kernel for RedHat allowed me to recreate the problem. However the USB module came in, allowing me to continue with my regular use as desired. I think this means that there may have been a patch applied to the kernel source used for the RedHat installation/default kernel that cleared up the problem with the ps/2 controller. But I really don't know enough about what I'm doing to find out what, if any, patch was used. I've been monitoring the mailing list archives, and googling for solutions just about every day for a couple weeks, but there doesn't seem to be any new developments on the issue. (There was a mention of a clocksync problem with the a7a266, fixed in an ac patch... a person or two had this AT Keyboard not found error, but then solved an unrelated problem that took care of their keyboard detection error as well... their solution would not work for me to solve my particular problem.) Seeing as this may be a problem directly relating to a flakey motherboard (it seems that the a7a266 and related boards were probably just a intermediate product for ASUS using the ALi chipset, they followed it up shortly with a line that used the more revered AMD chipset), I was hoping to get around this problem by just compiling a kernel with USB support built in and using that kernel with an installation disk. I attempted to do this using the rescue disk a number of times, but was unsuccessful. On what I consider my closest attempt, I had the rescue disk booting with my customized kernel, my USB keyboard was working great, I was loading the ramdisk image for the root filesystem from the other floppy successfully, but alas... it couldn't find init. The error was something along the those lines, followed by a suggestion to pass INIT= argument to the kernel. I'm not educated enough in exactly what is happening here to have an intelligent guess as to what to complete that argument with, other than the default locations (which I would assume don't since the kernel looks in the default locations). I believe I'm attributing this failure to either a misconfigured kernel, or perhaps some issues with a root.bin filesystem image that didn't conform to some changes made with the newer kernel that I was compiling. In that vein, I tried to compile a kernel of the same version number as the install disks, and the same error occured. If anyone has any suggestions to solve my problem, I would greatly appreciate it. At the current time, purchasing a different motherboard is not an option for me (regretfully)... so while motherboard suggestions will be accepted graciously, they will not solve my problem in the near future. Further explaination on the rescue disk customization process is welcome as well, although I am not lazy, and I have read all of the documentation and relavent how-to's and literature that I could get my hands on (not to say that there isn't more that I missed, of course). Finally, if someone can provide an installation process for me with USB support, I would be eternally greatful (net-inst cd, rescue.bin/root.bin, mini-howto... etc). If there is any more relavent information that would assist anyone in disecting my problem, please let me know and I will be happy to provide. Thank you for your time, Travis Bradshaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
