Online Debian Book

I decided to move my old Pentium 90 from Red Hat 6.2 to Debian. I installed 3.0r2 using the 2.2 kernel boot floppies. The P90 doesn't support booting from the blazingly fast 2X speed Sony CD-ROM, which also requires a the CDU31A driver. I couldn't find support for this driver in the 2.4 kernel boot floppies. I also had to load the 8390 and smc-ultra kernel modules to support a Linksys ISA NIC.

Along the way I found The Debian Universe, which "aims to become a complete guide to installing, managing and running Debian GNU/Linux." This is great because the last published book on Debian arrived in 2001 and described the 2.2r release.

I was able to update my kernel to 2.4.18 using the apt tools. This command showed me what was available:

apt-cache search kernel-image-2.4

Next I installed the 2.4.18 image:

apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-1-386

I added 'initrd=/initrd.img' to /etc/lilo.conf as prompted by the install process. When I rebooted I was running 2.4.18.

I intend to try upgrading to a 2.6 kernel using the packages provided by Debian Backports.