Debian 3.0 vs. Dell GX260

[Gary Woodman]

--- Gary Woodman <antigramp at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

[followup for posterity]

> I'm having difficulty installing woody on a new Dell GX260, using the
> floppy  set. Result is the same with the standard or idepci set; I
> haven't tried compact yet.
> 
> I plan to do a base install from floppy, then the rest over the net.
> This turned into a hurdle when I found the Ethernet was not activated
> (no eth0).

This particular GX260 has an Intel gigabit Ethernet (other GX260s have
3Com NICs). This is not supported out of the "box" on woody, though a
driver is available at Intel's Web site.

I managed to get woody by installing potato from CD, installing a
supported NIC (a 3C905-TX), then upgrading potato to woody from
mirror.aarnet. At this point, I discovered that the video
(i845-based[1], other GX260s have ATI Radeon video) also isn't
supported on woody. There is information at xfree.org:
http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/845driver.html

At this point, faced with a bit of hacking, I wimped out, and installed
RedHat 7.3 (yes, a couple of days before 8.0 appeared on tux). The
Intel NIC is supported, but for the same reason, the video is not, nor
does the VESA driver recommended by Intel perform usably. At present,
the GX260 has a PCI video card from my spares bin at home, which of
course is sub-optimal.

I'm considering my next move. I could possibly get Intel's NIC driver
module working on woody, but the i845 driver looks to be a major hack
on Xfree. It is scheduled for Xfree 4.3.0, probably at least a year
away even on testing. Still not supported on RH8.0.

This GX260 was not purchased for me or for Linux, so there's no real
basis for complaint. I would like to use it nonetheless, as it has a
CPU twice as fast and a hard disk twice as big as the machine presently
on my desk. Probably my best option is to install a supported video
card and NIC, go back to woody, try to get the Intel NIC working,
replace it if not.

All suggestions welcome!

Gary

[1] also in the Compaq "Education Special" systems recently touted
around campus, and probably many other contemporary machines with
built-in video.

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