Debian request

[unixronin]

I have the recollection someone on my FL is associated with Debian, but I can't recall who.  Anyone want to come forward?

The issue:  I find myself needing to create a customized Debian 4.0r1 i386 NETINST CD image, because the CD distributed by Debian has a kernel built without the workaround/patch for the ALi IDE chipset bug and, as a result, it won't work to install on a Thinkpad i1300.  After looking at it, I'm presuming all I need to do is replace the kernel with a new, properly patched kernel.  However, from the documentation I can find, it looks as though I have to have a working Debian install to be able to make a customized Debian installer CD.  Desite multiple efforts to get it to do so, the i1300 refuses to boot either from a USB memory stick or from the network, so I can't perform a USB install or a netboot install.

Comments

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

I was looking at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianCustomCD and came to the same conclusion. You can't customize Debian without Debian. Can you get a working copy of Debian off of a boot disk on one of your other computers? Another option(that I have no idea if it will work) is to mount the image on another computer and overwrite the kernel with the one you want. You should be able to build a kernel without a debian install.

I don't want to start a distro war but I would go with (k)ubuntu instead of Debian. They release upgrades much faster than Debian. but then I built my aged laptop with DamnSmallLinux and it screams along.

I guess it all depends on what you want to use the laptop for.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't have another machine running Debian. However, I was eventually able to install by booting the machine from a Knoppix CD and running debootstrap from there. However, I've now had Debian running on the machine for two full days and I have yet to manage to solve or work around the ALi154x IDE chipset bug that prevented me from installing from a Debian NETINST CD in the first place. This is particularly puzzling because when I had this laptop running Gentoo the week before, I was able to work around the ALi bug with my very first custom kernel compile, but the same fix (to the best of my recollection) is not working on Debian.