Installing sarge
Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 has been superseded by
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (etch
). Some of these
installation images may no longer be available, or may no longer work, and
you are recommended to install etch instead.
To install Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r8 (sarge), download any of the following images:
Documentation
If you read only one document before installing, read our Installation Howto, a quick walkthrough of the installation process. Other useful documentation includes:
- Sarge 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 3.1r8. 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.
Errata for release 3.1r8
No changes from release 3.1r7.
Errata for release 3.1r7
The issue listed for 3.1r6 regarding support for installing oldstable
from network mirrors has been resolved. All 3.1r7 installation CDs and other
installer images fully support installing Sarge again.
Installation of the Desktop environment
task may fail when installing
from a full CD. This is due to the fact that OpenOffice is not included on
the first CD, but that for some openoffice.org packages security updates are
available from the security mirrors.
The problem can be avoided by also selecting the option manual package
selection
when selecting the desktop task. After that, aptitude
will display the packages to be installed. Find the openoffice.org-bin
package and unselect it by pressing the -
key, and then continue the
installation by pressing the g
key.
The problem can also be avoided by adding a network mirror, or by also scanning
the second full CD during Apt configuration.
Errata for release 3.1r6
The issue with kernel selection from 3.1r5 was resolved in this release.
Due to the fact that Sarge is no longer stable
but is now oldstable
,
the installer will no longer correctly fetch packages from network mirrors.
This most affects installations that use a network mirror before the first
reboot, such as netboot and businesscard images. You can still install Sarge
using netinst and full CD or DVD images as long as you manually edit the file
/etc/apt/sources.list to make sure that any source lines for network
mirrors point to sarge
and not to stable
before
installing packages from a network mirror. Effectively, this means that you
cannot use a network mirror during the installation!
Errata for release 3.1r5
On four architectures the installer may select an incorrect kernel for your
system. The affected architectures are: i386, hppa, ia64 and s390.
You can work around this issue by booting the installer with the parameter
debconf/priority=medium. This will result in a full list of
available kernels being shown, from which you can manually select the flavor
that is appropriate for your system.
Errata for release 3.1r4
The 3.1r4 point release does not include an update of the installer, except that the issue introduced with 3.1r3 for sparc32 was fixed with this release. The general comments listed below for 3.1r3 are still valid.
Errata for release 3.1r3
In addition to the original errata for Sarge 3.1r0 listed below, the following issues should be noted for the update of the installer with the 3.1r3 release (r1 and r2 did not include an update of the installer).
With the update of the kernel for this release, some of the installer images
originally released with sarge 3.1r0 will no longer work due to a mismatch
between the kernel the installer boots and kernel udebs loaded later. Affected
are all installation methods that download udebs from the network, e.g.
floppy-based and netboot installations. The updated installer images should
work correctly.
CD-based installations are not affected, so you can continue to use
CD/DVD images from earlier sarge releases.
- Netboot installation on sparc32 is broken. Due to problems with the generation of kernel udebs, some modules required for netboot installations are missing in the images. Other installation methods may have similar problems.
Errata for release 3.1r0
- Booting with vga= will make lilo installation fail. If you need to pass a vga= parameter to the kernel when booting the installer, do not choose to install lilo. Installing grub will work ok. This problem is fixed in daily builds of the installer.
- JFS broken on ia64. The JFS filesystem is broken when installing ia64 using the (default) 2.6 kernel. Either avoid using JFS on ia64, or use the 2.4 kernel.
- Red screen at boot. Sometimes the installer may come up with a red screen at boot when using the 2.6 kernel. The install works fine, there is no error, but the screen background is just the wrong color, red, instead of blue. This is bug #273192.
- SATA driver can block access to CD drive in installations
from CD.
On systems having a SATA IDE controller that also has the CD drive
connected to it, you may see the installer hanging during hardware
detection for the CD drive or failing to read the CD just afterwards. A
possible reason is that the SATA driver (ata_piix and maybe others) is
blocking access to the CD drive.
You can try to work around this by booting the installer in expert mode and, in the "Detect and mount CD-ROM" step, selecting only the drivers needed for CD support. These are (ide-)generic, ide-cd and isofs.
The drivers needed to access the disk will still be loaded, but at a later stage. By loading the CD drivers before the SATA driver in this way, you may be able to complete the installation. Note that CD-ROM access may still be an issue after rebooting into the installed system. - Installer fails to boot on some HP PA-RISC systems. On some systems the ramdisk set up for the installer is too small by default. Booting the installer with parameter "ramdisk_size=21504" (or, if that also fails, a higher value) should solve this. This problem has so far been reported for HP9000-712/60 and HP715/100XC.
- Debian supports limited number of block devices by default. If you have multiple harddisk controllers, you may have to create additional device nodes before you reboot. Debian currently supports only /dev/hd[a-h][1-20] and /dev/sd[a-h][1-15] by default. This is not a problem during the installation itself because the installer uses a dynamic /dev, but may lead to failures during the reboot after the installation.
Improved versions of the installation system are being developed for the next Debian release, and can also be used to install sarge. For details, see the Debian-Installer project page.
Installer for the blind - "speakup"
For the i386 architecture Debian provides a special set of installation images for floppies that support braille displays. A complete list of supported models may be found in the brltty documentation.
