Installing Debian onto Zeos Meridian 400 notes

Base install

I used a Dell TrueMobile? 1150 PCMCIA card for network access during the install.

first, make boot floppies. There are four disk images at http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current//images/floppy/.

Download them onto some computer with a floppy drive, put in a floppy that is either blank or that you want to overwrite, and do this command as root:

	dd if=FILENAME of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync

where FILENAME is the path to the image that you want to write onto this floppy.

Next, I run "diff FILENAME /dev/fd0". Often, this fails with an I/O error -- this mean that floppy is bad. I throw it out and try another one. If diff succeeds, or terminates but says there are differences, i'm not sure exactly what that means (whether, on the one hand, no differences really means the floppy is a perfect copy of the image, and whether, on the other, if there are differences if that is bad).

I didn't need to use the "cd-drivers" floppy, so maybe you can skip making that one.

Then, you boot off the "boot" floppy.

You get to the main boot screen. I typed "expert" to get the expert install options. Dunno if that was necessary or not. Booting continues. Halfway through the boot you are prompted to insert the "root" floppy. Eventually, the installer starts.

The installer gives you a warning:

"[!!] Low memory Insufficient memory to install"

Apparently it wants at least 22 MB of memory. The machine I was using had only 20 MB. It went fine for me, though.

Soon you get to "Load drivers from a floppy".

Put in the "net-drivers" floppy, and then select "Yes" on this screen. You get a list of driver packages from that floppy. I selected only the following two:

nic-pcmcia-modules-.... pcmcia-cs-udeb

Then there are a few steps that go like usual -- mostly. There are some warning dialogs that tell you that a bunch of IDE modules didn't load. Don't worry, we'll deal with them in a moment. After you get past configuring the network card, the network, and the Debian repository, you get a list of installer components to load. I checked only "ide-core-modules-..." and "ide-modules-...", then pressed "Continue".

Even after this, you get the "can't load some modules" thingee again, with a shorter list of

The rest of the install worked like usual.

The hard drive is listed as a 350.2 MB Areal A340 U.

I partitioned it with 304MB for an ext2 partition, and about 46MB swap.