I managed to misplace the three Red Hat 9 CDs that I had burned for installing. For some reason the install was freezing at the very first screen with input. I was ready to give up, but Erik suggested the catchall linux nousb boot option, which tends to play nice with some laptops. I was going to give it a go, but since I can’t find the CD’s, I’ll have to move on.
I was considering the latest Red hat beta, but since I’m running low on blank CD-R’s, I burned a Debian (Woody) mini-cd and away I go.
I’ve installed a Debian system or two, but I’m by no means a Debian power user, so some of my observations might be obvious to the hardcore Debian user.
First off, the boot from mini-cd went fine. I went through the ugly but helpful menu driven installer. Everything was fine until I needed to choose an apt mirror. Debian didn’t like the on-board 10/100 NIC. That’s okay, I slapped in a PCMCIA card, connected it up and configured it the manual way. Alt-F2 took me to a new window. I logged in and typed ifconfig eth0 up followed by ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. I had to fiddle with route for a minute to add a default gateway, but other than that things went smoothly. I also added a few nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf and went back to the main install window (Alt-F1).
Hopefully I’ll be able to get the built-in NIC working after the install is complete. I am currently apt getting a ton of stuff for my barebones net install.
Update: Any error that ends with Aiee, killing interrupt handler can’t be good. Trying again. It seems to have worked. I still need to get X and the built-in NIC working though.