Dear Debian Friends! I tried various installations of Woody from a set of CDs which where created around Nov 9, and found some problems, I would like to report in this manner.
The machine was an Inspiron-5000 Laptop, with a D-link-650 PCMCIA network card (compatible to NE2000). None of the Woody kernels I've tried recognised my network card, so I ended up with the network unconfigured after install. After playing unsuccessfully with the network setup, I tried recompiling a 2.2.19 kernel with PCMCIA support and also a 2.4.10 kernel (with its own PCMCIA support) - with no more success. Then I tried an install from scratch with a Potato-2.2R2 CD (kernel 2.2.18pre21) and it did recognise the D-link-650 network card fine, and configured the network right! Upgrading to woody did not change anything, the network still worked fine, until I tried to upgrade the kernel too. I tried kernel packages 2.2.19 (vanilla), 2.2.19-???-ext3, 2.4.10-???-686, 2.4.12 (vanilla), installing them with dselect. None of these kernels supported my PCMCIA based network card. When I re-installed the old 2.2.18pre21 kernel, everything worked fine again. Perhaps I missed something, but I would say, the newer kernels (including 2.2.19) have a broken module there somewhere in the pcmcia stuff. - Josef
