Hello Pete, I spent three hours last night trying to help my dad install Debian. Unless I'm more stupid than I realise, there is a major flaw in the Debian installation heuristic, so I'm copying this to [EMAIL PROTECTED] in case it counts as a bug. If not, perhaps you can defend it for me!
The situation: we have a reasonably modern PC with Windoze occupying 16Gb of a 20Gb disk, called the CWC. There is a much older PC functioning as a "router" - this one happily runs Slackware and shares the cablemodem connection using NAT. (It also acts as a print server.) There is a 3rd Windoze-only PC on the network, called the CFC, but it doesn't feature in this little story. So, we decide to install Debian on the CWC. We decide to do a net (HTTP) install, since the cablemodem is blindingly fast and we've never done one before. We boot into Windoze, fire up CuteFTP and download the following: ..../current/install.bat ..../current/linux.bin (kernel image) ..../current/dosutils/loadlin.exe ..../current/images-1.44/root.bin (initial ramdisk image) Off we go. Kernel boots fine, loads the initrd fine. We step through the install, sorting out swap space (hda5) and creating and mounting a root partition (hda6). We get to "Install Kernel and Driver Modules" and find no net option - we try "Configure the Network" but this Debian kernel hasn't detected the network card (a D-Link DFE-530TX). So we go back to "Configure Device Driver Modules" thinking, no problem, we'll pop in the module and be off. The modules are of course not there because we didn't download them, so we go back into Windoze and fetch ..../current/drivers.tgz Then we start over (from install.bat) and step through again to the same place. We use "Mount a Previously Initialized Partition" to mount hda1 on /target/mnt/hda1, in order to gain access to the modules. Turns out we can't configure a module (even though we now have the driver tarball visible), because modules are not "installed"!!! Surely a decent init script could accept user input to point it towards a module tarball, and look inside said tarball for the modules? Anyway, doesn't matter too much because we can now do "Install Kernel and Driver Modules" from /target/mnt/hda1 instead of looking for a net option. For some reason we need to download the boot floppy image ..../current/images-1.44/rescue.bin because the install script can't install the kernel from the linux.bin file. We do this, and succeed in installing the kernel and modules, but we still need to configure the network card before we can complete the first part of the install (the "Install the Base System" step). The D-Link DFE-530TX uses the Via-Rhine chipset, and therefore the via-rhine.o driver. Attempting to insmod this driver fails, seeming to require some parameter or other. This is odd, because via-rhine.c says that the driver reads card data from the EEPROM, so no arguments should be necessary. We go back into Windoze AGAIN to get the details just in case (IRQ 5, i/o base 0x9400, mem base 0xe100), but no amount of jiggery-pokery gets the sodding via-rhine driver to work. I don't know enough about the differences between 2.2 and 2.4 to know whether the via-rhine driver is somehow flaky in 2.2, but we try downloading all the 2.4 stuff just in case: ..../current/bf2.4/install.bat ..../current/bf2.4/linux.bin ..../current/bf2.4/drivers.tgz ..../current/bf2.4/images-1.44/root.bin ..../current/bf2.4/images-1.44/rescue.bin (not stupid, me - I suspect we might need this) Guess what? The install.bat files says "Hah! Well done wasting your time downloading this. Due to a bug in loadlin (which we haven't bothered to fix), you cannot install the 2.4 kernel from hard disk. Try writing out no fewer than SIX floppies, not forgetting to download rawrite and all four driver disk images (because we provide no means of using only the disk with the driver you need) and do a floppy install." Well, at that point it was 2:30am for me and I gave up. I mean, for goodness sake, I'm more technically literate than 99% of the population, and I was tearing my hair out at that point. In these days of always-on net connections, you should be able to download a handful of stuff (kernel, initrd, modules) and go. Linux is never going to survive if it isn't easy to install. For everybody's information, the network card worked perfectly well under the previous Linux installation (it was autodetected), so I don't know what the problem was last night. If anybody would like to provide any hints, please do. Of course we could just download an ISO image and use that, but that's not the point - what if we didn't have a CD burner? Six floppies? Come on. CC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]