Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 has been superseded by Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny). Some of these installation images may no longer be available, or may no longer work, and you are recommended to install lenny instead.

Installing Debian GNU/Linux etch-and-a-half

Overview

The etch-and-a-half release is essentially just the most recent point release for etch, but with a more recent kernel (version 2.6.24). The main purpose of this release is to allow installation of etch on systems not supported by the 2.6.18 kernel that is used in regular etch installs.

For further details about scope, purpose and limitations of the etch-and-a-half release, see the Release Notes.

Installing

For new installations of etch-and-a-half the current release of Debian Installer for lenny is used, with minor changes for compatibility with etch.

Please read the notes below carefully before installing etch-and-a-half.

Because the current lenny installer is an RC release, it may have some errata you would not expect in a stable release. See the errata section at the bottom of this page for details.
The lenny installer includes a number of changes from the etch installer. See the release announcements for the beta1, beta2, RC1 and RC2 releases of the installer for an overview of changes.
This includes changes that affect preseeding (automated installations). See the appendix on preseeding in the Installation Guide for lenny (linked below) for correct preseeding options.

The following installation options are available to install Debian GNU/Linux etch-and-a-half.

netinst CD image (generally 135-175 MB)

Only available for selected architectures.
Will automatically install etch-and-a-half.
Will automatically install the 2.6.24 kernel.
Can optionally be used in combination with images from the current full CD/DVD set for etch. After the installation of the base system, the installer will ask if additional CDs should be scanned; at that point insert CD1 or DVD1, or the KDE or Xfce CDs.

businesscard CD image (generally 20-50 MB)

Available for all architectures.
Needs to be booted with the option 'suite=etch' to install etch-and-a-half.
Will automatically install the 2.6.24 kernel.

netboot images

Available for all architectures.
Needs to be booted with the option 'suite=etch' to install etch-and-a-half.
Will automatically install the 2.6.24 kernel.
Other images than netboot (usb stick, floppy) may be usable, but have not been tested.
Images for subarchitectures that will be supported in lenny but are not supported in etch, may not be usable.

Additional notes

The current etch-and-a-half installation images based on Debian Installer Lenny RC1 use a newer kernel (2.6.26) than the version that was included in the etch-and-a-half release and is installed for the target system (2.6.24). In some cases this can mean that hardware which is supported during the installation does not work after the reboot into the installed system because support for it was added after the 2.6.24 version.
If any of the hardware in your system requires firmware to be loaded with the device driver, the installer may ask if it should load the firmware from a removable medium, such as a floppy disk or USB stick. General information about loading firmware during an installation can be found in the Installation Guide (see Documentation below).
For the installation images, verification files (SHA256SUMS, SHA512SUMS and other) are available from the same directory as the images.
There are two reasons the netinst image is only available for selected architectures. First, a lot of architectures don't really have new hardware that is not supported by the 2.6.18 kernel. Second, some architectures are most commonly installed using netboot, making the CD image unnecessary.

Documentation

If you read only one document before installing, read our Installation Howto, a quick walkthrough of the installation process. Other useful documentation includes:

Lenny Installation Guide
detailed installation instructions
Debian-Installer FAQ and Debian-CD FAQ
common questions and answers
Debian-Installer Wiki
community maintained documentation

Errata

This is a list of known problems in the installer shipped with Debian GNU/Linux etch-and-a-half. If you have experienced a problem installing Debian and do not see your problem listed here, please send us an installation report describing the problem or check the wiki for other known problems.

Most issues can be found in the Release Notes for etch-and-a-half or in the errata for the current Debian Installer release for lenny, on which the installer for etch-and-a-half is based.

In addition, the errata listed below are specific to the etch-and-a-half release.

Errata specific to etch-and-a-half

The etch-and-a-half 4.0r5 netinst images for both i386 and amd64 had some minor problems with the isolinux boot menu. This was fixed in the 4.0r5a images.