Debian Sarge pre-rc2 experiences: part 1

Hi folks,

I finally convinced myself to put Linux on my TC1000.

Actually, Jim Gettys and Keith Packard convinced me, but that's another story.

After going back over some months of the mailing list messages, I decided to
try the Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition.

I have an external USB2 CD-RW drive, so I booted from that. However, after
Linux booted the keyboard was dead and Linux said that it couldn't see the
CD-ROM.

I got the same results from my Syslinux and SystemRescue disks.

Since I use Debian (unstable) on my desktop system, I decided to download the
Debian Sarge pre-rc2 net installer disk and try it. I used the

Much to my surprise, it booted fine and began an installation!

I used ntfsresize to shrink my main partition down to 15Gb, and then made the
new Linux partitions in the remaining space (using the default partitioning).
And I let it put GRUB in the master boot record, after it detected NT OK on
the first partition.

I double-checked in Windows to make sure that my first partition was OK.

Then I rebooted for the second part of the installation.

However, when I did that I got a few complaints (like a stack trace when no
one handled IRQ11), and before I could interact with it, the keyboard
wouldn't work.

I saw this on the bottom of the messages:

usb2-2: control timeout on ep0out
ohci_hcd 0000:00:0c.0: Unlink after no-IRQ? Different ACPI or APIC settings
may help.

However, starting with "noapic pci=noacpi" resulted in the same thing.

So then I rebooted into the install CD again, and chose to do the second half
of the installation from the first stage. So I answered some more questions,
and installed a lot of packages.

When I rebooted from *that*, I was able to use an external keyboard! After
booting into single-user mode to avoid the keyboard lockup, I installed some
more packages.

I kept noticing, though, that it kept warning me about "Fake start-stop-daemon
called". And some package installs weren't completing properly.

I found I had to copy /usr/sbin/start-stop-daemon.debian
to /usr/sbin/start-stop-daemon to get rid of that message.

I was finally able to install XFree 4.3.0 and KDE; both of these installed
easily (I chose the nv driver at first).

I noticed that the Debian included the Atmel driver for the wireless card, but
not the tc1k XFree86 driver or the fpi serial driver.

And saying

  xset DPMS force off

just turned the screen to black, but didn't turn the backlight off.

So now I'm waiting for a kernel compile to finish (I had the installer kernel,
which includes absolutely *everything*).

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com