On Sat, Sep 22, 2001 at 09:40:01PM -0700, Shawn Wheatley wrote: > I am trying to become a new convert to Debian. I had > previously installed Progeny and would like to try > full blown Debian from scratch. I saw a link on the > Debian Laptop list archive > (http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop/2001/debian-laptop-200104/msg00029.html) > saying that you had gotten this to work, including > DVD. I would love to get some detailed instructions > on how you did some of this, as my first install did > *not* go so well. > > Thanks,
(Hope you don't mind, but I've cc'd this reply to the debian-laptop list, so that it may serve as some form of documentation. Since I'm far too bone-idle, and get about one request for information per week, this is no bad thing :) Hi! I did indeed get most of the parts of the laptop working. Since you don't say which parts failed I'll give you a quick summary of how the various parts got done, and then you're more than welcome to ask further questions. Now I am in a quite useful situation: we have a full debian mirror at work, so the install was basically a case of installing a base potato system from CD, and then pointing apt at out mirror. I've written some documentation about how I got the DVD playback working at http://people.debian.org/~dsw (it should be obvious which document it is). X was a bit of PITA. For some reason the configuration of X doesn't really seem to work. The easiest is if you install it all, then if it still doesn't work I'll send you my xconfig file (/etc/X11/XF86Config-4). If you don't use XFree 4, then the x server you want is the Mach64 (had me very confused for quite some time). If you do use XFree 4.x then you want the ati driver. For sound I used Alsa 0.5. I do believe however that the correct drivers are already in the kernel, but I haven't used them. In the case of the builtin modem/ethernet card you might be out of luck, as some A21Ms ship with combo cards by 3com, and some ship with cards from Xircom/Intel. The 3com cards are not supported, but the Intel ones are. The drivers can be found on IBM's pages. I don't have the link at the moment, but if you need them I'll find it for you. Install the pciutils package and run 'lspci -vv' and look at the output. The devices I have not got working are usb and irda, since I have no need for them. Sorry for not being more specific, but if you let me know where you ran into problems I'll be happy to help you. Cheers Dave
