I was having trouble installing Debian on an HP dx5150, which uses an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. I first tried the AMD64 3.1r0a install DVD, but whichever 2.6.x kernel it came with didn't support SATA, and I only had a SATA hard drive. I was able to do a network install with the CD image from here
http://tinyplanet.ca/~lsorense/amd64/ Unfortunately, this installation turned out to have lots of incompatibilities with the software I needed to run on it, so I wanted to go back to a 32 bit version. I tried the Debian 3.1r1 install DVDs and had the same problem with the SATA drive. I understand that 3.1r2 is out, but that it uses the same kernel as 3.1r1, so I didn't try that. I then found this great post http://npat.livejournal.com/46390.html which explained how to install Debian on the exact machine I have using the install CD from http://kmuto.jp/b.cgi/debian/d-i-2614.htm That worked, but I have two remaining questions. First, my choices were to install the 2.6.14-2-386 kernel or the 2.6.14-2-686-smp kernel. Does anyone know if there would be any incompatibility between the 686-smp kernel and my machine, which uses an AMD Athlon64 3000+ processor? Would it perform significantly better than the 2.6.14-2-386 kernel? Second, what I'd like to do is wind up with a full install of Sarge, as if I'd installed everything from the DVD. I have both DVDs from the 3.1r1 DVD set. Is there a way to install everything from the DVD that's not already installed? I'm new to Debian and not sure how to do this. I know I can apt-get individual packages, but when compiling software that expects package X to be found and which fails to compile when it's not found, sometimes it isn't easy to figure out what package to install to satisfy the dependency, so I'd rather start with the whole distribution. I can't boot from the DVDs, because then my hard drive won't be found by the kernel on the DVDs. Thanks if anyone can shed any light on this. Gil
