The fourth Debian is (probably) lucky
Posted: September 2, 2010 Filed under: Broadcom, Debian, HP ProBook 4510s, Keryx | Tags: broadband, broadcom, debian, icewm, install, kmandla, networkmanager, squeeze, windows 2000, zte 2 Comments »So today I had this great idea. I’m going to scrape the Xubuntu (with bits and pieces of GNOME and KDE) install and put Debian Squeeze on there instead. Yes, I failed here before, but this time I actually have a plan (unbelievable! 
).
Now, here’s what I’ll do:
- Standard installation of Debian Squeeze base (the one I did before).
- Use Keryx to get a minimal install of IceWM, plus NetworkManager and modemmanager (for the ZTE).
- Connect to the Internet via my ZTE modem using NetworkManager.
- Use the instructions here to download and install the Broadcom driver.
- Set up that ugly framebuffer to look good in widescreen. As detailed here, I guess.
And then, provided it works, I’ll configure IceWM to look like Windows 2000, as K.Mandla detailed here. 
A day of failure with Debian
Posted: August 30, 2010 Filed under: Broadcom, Debian, HP ProBook 4510s, Keryx | Tags: broadband, broadcom, debian, framebuffer, hp probook, keryx, zte 12 Comments »Today, I tried installing Debian on my HP ProBook 4510S. Three times.
Obviously, I failed. On the first try, I got the wrong CD image (Lenny instead of Squeeze) and only realized that after I installed it. On the second try, I assigned the 500MB /dev/sda1 to / instead of /boot, which resulted in a cataclysmic Debian-style out-of-space dpkg error. Something I got about four times with Ubuntu on my Eee PC, but that’s another story. And on the third try, I almost got it done and even did an offline install of the Broadcom STA driver using Keryx, dpkg and module-assistant. However, it failed to detect any networks, citing a read error 
Then I gave up and decided to install Linux Mint 9 LXDE. I just burnt it on a CD-RW and I’ll install it as soon as I finish this post 
Anyway, here’s my “detailed report” on installing Debian Squeeze:
- You don’t get an Internet connection during the install, so you have to download the 600+ MB CD1 image instead of the 180 MB netinst one.
- The first CD image for Squeeze doesn’t even come with wireless-tools packaged.
- You absolutely need Keryx to do any kind of offline Debian install. And the guide here.
- It’s probably easier to do all this if you install GNOME. But it’s a pain to remove in my experience, so I didn’t even try that.
- The framebuffer made my eyes bleed. 800×600 on a widescreen display? No thank you.
- Doing an offline install of the Broadcom STA driver on Debian-based distros is mostly impossible.
The Broadcom driver has been annoying me since I got the ProBook. The only distro on which I managed to manually install it is Fedora. On Ubuntu, I now connect to the Internet using my ZTE MF110 modem and use Hardware Drivers (jockey?) to automatically install it. On a side note, I couldn’t do that with Kubuntu, because KNetworkManager is too buggy to let me connect to networks that do not support 2G data (which Digi Mobil Romania is).
The conclusion? I probably won’t install Debian on this machine again too soon.
