>> I've been encouraging my students to install Debian on their personal >> machines, and we've found out that a lot of them get the wrong Debian >> installer: >> >> - some of them attempt to install an AMD64 version of Debian in >> a 32-bit-only virtual machine;
> Why are they creating 32-bit virtual machines? Perhaps this is a bad > default in the VM manaager? Yes, it was a bad default in the laptop's BIOS (VT-something was disabled). HP's bug, obviously, but it would have made for a better experience if the Debian installer had complained in a comprehensible manner straight away. >> - others attempt to install an i386 version on 64-bit hardware. > This should work, in general. It won't work on a 64-bit system that > only supports EFI boot - and the installer won't be able to report > that, unless it includes a dummy 64-bit EFI program just to do that. It was a recent laptop, and the user had manually enabled BIOS boot. The installer hung with a black screen just after the initial menu. > We should not do in this in the second case, since it is supposed to > work. (But a warning might be reasonable.) Please. -- Juliusz
