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In this page I plan to document how I got Debian Woody 3.0 working on my brand-spanking new Dell Latitude D400, a nice little laptop with a fast processor and a whole bunch of built-ins.
I used this article as a rough guide.
Installation
I first attempted to install straight from the Knoppix Live-CD Debian meta-distribution. At first it seemed promising: I was able to get to a boot screen, but because of Dell's proprietary CD-ROM connector Knoppix would fail shortly after saying it was unable to find the installation sources.
I then tried using the bf2.4 minimal boot-floppies image. This as well seemed promising. I was able to go through the installation, partition the drive via cfdisk but when it came time to finding and loading kernel modules the installer was unable to locate my CD-ROM, leaving me stuck.
I decided to use a little trick I've tried in the past (for a Sony VAIO PCG SRX-77) to install on these quirky laptops with external CDs.
Here's what I did:
The "Thank You Redhat" Method:
- I took a Redhat 9.0 disk and did a "minimal" install.
- I then copied the Knoppix CD to a partition (/dev/hda6) via my minimal Redhat 9.0 installation.
- I rebooted via the knoppix Live-CD and passed the "fromhd=/dev/hda6" option to the bootloader. Knoppix booted flawlessly, with networking and sound(!).
- I then used Knoppix's "knoppix-installer" script to initiate a Knoppix install to my system.
Yes it's a pain, but as far as I'm concerned it's worth it because of Knoppix's excellent hardware detection and configuration. I don't particularly enjoy configuring every single detail of my systems, but I do love Debian. This strikes a perfect balance.
One could use the "Thank You Redhat" method to copy the debian boot-floppies stuff to a partition, if you wanted a woody stable system.
You could also copy the Knoppix/boot-floppies stuff to a partition via Windows, but this machine has never booted windows and I wanted it to stay debian only. The "Thank you Redhat" method got me there.
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