Hi, Sunil! > I am very, very new to linux and attempting to install Debian on my PC. > I am having 3 independent problems that I hope someone can help me with. > 1) I have a Mitsumi CD-ROM drive, but when I try to install the drivers > for it during the "install drivers phase" of installation, I keep > getting the message installation failed. It seems like the drive is > supported (there are options for a Mitsumi CD-ROM drive and an Mitsumi > extended drive). I am not sure if it is failing because I am giving it > the wrong command line options (specifying IRQ and IO, which admittedly I > am unsure about) or what. > Hm-m-m. I'm guessing here. You have Mitsumi CD-ROM which you plug into Sound Card, right? So it's not so called "ATAPI IDE CD-ROM". If that's true you can have problems with that because of sound card. I had SONY cdu31a CDROM which was plugged in some SB-16 compatible card (real junky). The problem is that you HAVE TO initialize the card, so it'll set IRQ and IO addresses. It's likely to be quite complicated under Linux, as vendors do not open there driver codes. The only solution I found was to start DOS first, it'll initialize card, after that you use loadlin to boot linux. Then cdu31a.o module was picked up and everything worked.
> 2) I have an SMC 1211TX network card, and I am trying to use the > rtl8139 driver for it, but I keep receiving an installation failed message > as well. I know that someone else has successfully used this driver with > this card, but he was not using Debian. To get it to work, he ended up > hacking the drivers a little and compiling it into the kernel. My > question is: after only the base install, is it possible to compile the > kernel? My original plan was to configure my network card, and then > download packages through ftp, but I may need to compile code before I can > configure my network card. > Sounds like a good plan. I never worked with this card, sorry. You may compile kernel on a different Linux computer, that's fine. But to compile it on your computer you need quite a few things to be installed, without network it'll be extremely painful. Would you consider borrowing card from another computer just to get started? See also comment later. > 3) During the base install, I keep getting a message that says "There > was a problem extracting the base system from /target/base2_0.tgz" after I > have entered all 5 floppy disks with the base system on them (without > receiving any disk errors). I used rawrite2 under a DOS shell in win95 to > write to the disks (I no longer have Win95 on my computer), so what could > the problem be? That sounds bad. Try floppiless installation if you have DOS FAT-16 partition. If you are going to experiment with your linux this partition may be quite handy, especially once you can no longer boot your Linux. You can also download many *.deb pacages on that partition (you network is not working under Linux, but perhaps is working under DOS), boot Linux, mount FAT16 partition and install those packages. Rescue diskette is a good thing to have too :) Good luck! Sasha.
