- The description of the laptop can be found here
- Debian stable (3.1r3) was installed using the network install, as described here
- The vanilla install was largely left unchanged, as almost everything worked
- The only glitch was due to the presence of protected part of the disc reseverd by T42 for extra features (system backup). This part occupies initial disc sectors and prohibits boot-up using GRUB. The solution is to:
- install GRUB somewhere else (beginning of your Linux partition let's say /dev/hda3)
- transfer initial portion of that partition to a file
dd if=/dev/hda3 of=debian.img bs=512 count=1
- transfer the file to Win32 partition
c:\debian.img
- append your GNU/Linux distribution to Win32 bootloader
in the file c:\boot.init add c:\debian.img="Debian 3.1r3"
This is explained all over the net, for example here
- Other excellend HowTo's describing installation of GNU/Linux on the machine can be found here