It took me all night and all morning, but I’ve finally got Debian working on my laptop. I wish in a way that it didn’t have to be this difficult, but it turned out to be the case.
I burnt a netinst disc of 5.06 amd64, inserted it and expected it to work. Instead, I was informed that my CD drive couldn’t be detected (!) (this is while already proceeding through the installation process). A bit disheartened, I looked at the other options; TFTP, getting a full CD image (but that wouldn’t help), and realised I could try using GRUB to bootstrap the process from the local disk.
Bootstrapped the netinst with GRUB, only to be told that the harddisk couldn’t be located! Ay carumba. Looking into it more carefully, I eventually decided to modprobe ide-* (core, generic, cd_rom, etc.)—and my harddisk appeared (this also caused my CD drive to be findable again, too). So I went through, and got to the process of partitioning the disk, where I decided to format the new root partition with ext3—not an unreasonable request, I thought. The netinst (bootstrapped from harddisk) is supposed to work even when the disk it was bootstrapped from is changed. Instead, it simply hung on mkfs.ext3. I gave it a reasonable amount of time to run (30 minutes?), but no luck—the process wouldn’t even respond to SIGKILL, so I figured something had gone badly wrong.
Now that my disk to bootstrap from was clobbered, I had no choice but to rely on the netinst CD. Again, inserting the IDE modules made the CD and harddrive appear again, and I got up to partitioning the disk. I figured it might’ve been booting from the disk itself that killed the ext3 format, so I tried again. Same result! Tried again with reiserfs. And it worked (after a harrowing 3 or 4 minutes).
Having formatted / with reiserfs, it then attempted to format hda5 as a swap partition. It then errored out, telling me that hda5 was in use (“Resource in use” appeared in dmesg), and I got the “Ignore”/”Cancel” options from partman. You can try to ignore, but then it tells you that partioning failed, and you can’t proceed without that step succeeding. In the end, my only option was to tell it to have no swap partition at all (and to manually add the swap partition once the system was all working).
After that, installation proceeded more-or-less straightforwardly. Of course, wireless didn’t work in the installer, so I had to be physically connected, and the entire process slowed to a crawl about two-thirds through configuring packages (maybe because there was no swap!).
Once installation finished, I rebooted my machine. And I got about three lines of output from GRUB as it loaded the kernel, and then nothing. Woo.
Booted it in single-user mode. I get the full kernel output on the console, which stops after it loaded the SD card reader drivers. Paging up, I found it was waiting for the root device to come up. Presumably it didn’t know about the harddrive here, either, and I had no console to go modprobing in.
A few months back, I set the SATA mode to “Compatibility” (instead of AHCI) to allow a Windows XP installation (as it couldn’t find my harddrive in AHCI mode). I set it back to AHCI. And everything worked.
Well, not everything. Wireless didn’t work, graphics didn’t work properly, sound didn’t work.. I upgraded to testing, did a full dist-upgrade, then installed the latest kernel, and installed a binary driver from RealTek for the 8191SE.. and everything’s.. finally.. working.
I note that Ubuntu literally works “out of the box”, as does the installation, so this was more effort than I’m used to. Maybe I’m getting old. ;-) But anyway, hopefully going forward I’ll be able to help out with Debian in more ways, particularly with OCaml.