I've been trying to install some flavor of Debian AMD-64 to a system I upgraded last night with little success. Hardware Abit AV8 with VIA K8T800 Pro/ VT8237 chipset SATA/RAID (not in use yet) VT8237 IDE Audio (AC-97?) 3400+ processor 512MB/1GM RAM (recycled hardware) Some year+ old Seagate ATA drive - 130GB Ancient #9 video card (S3968) Ancient Tulip Ethernet card IDE CDROM burner
Trying any of the ISOs that looked like they made sense (anything save the netboot) the system was horribly unstable. It ranged from rebooting instantly when hitting <return> from the boot prompt to locking up while loading modules from the CD or partitioning and formatting the hard drive. It did not recognize the on board LAN so I put the Tulip card in. It recognized that but DHCP did not work and manual configuration resulted in lots of error messages to the console. (Incidentally, it was not clear which ISO I should be using. I typically do a network install since I'm on cable Internet. The HOW-TO points to two sites for boot images and there are a variety of ISOs with no description save the name to explain what they are. Puzzling to me, the directory http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/debian-installer/current/cdrom/ contains no CDROM nor any indication if I am supposed to build one from the files found there.) The machine was so horribly unstable - crapping out ad a different place nearly each try - that I thought that there was some problem with the hardware. I tried booting a recent Knoppix CD and it seemed to work a *lot* better, though it was not without problem. It recognized the on board LAN and sound with no problem, but configured my serial mouse systems mouse as a PS/2 mouse. (There is probably a boot option to fix that, but I didn't bother. A text console was fine with me.) It did also report once that KDE could not start due to insufficient RAM (with 1GB available. ;) and once when running a command at the shell prompt, I got a "bus error." I ran the Knoppix memory test since last night and it reported no errors. I'm in the process of installing Sarge i386 and have just finished rebooting. So far it is running flawlessly. So, I'm wondering how to go about installing one of the 64 bit Debian flavors. do I identify my hardware and build a kernel with only support for it? I presume that some driver that doesn't belong is leading to the instability. then it's DFS for the rest, right? Suggestions and comments welcomed! <back to my ia32 install :( > thanks, hank -- Beautiful Sunny Winfield