My brother got a new Dell Inspiron 630m, and (of course ;) ) we had to install Debian on it. So we go and download the latest testing image, pop it in the cd drive, boot up, and voilá: The installer fails to detect the cd drive (a sony dw-q58a, a pci ide drive). After several workarounds performed (noone worked, of course), we tried using an old image we had, the first Debian we ever installed: testing from august 2004. Guess what: it worked!

So, happy with our (not so) new Debian installed, we tried to update. Horrible things happened: upgrading e2fsprogs is a pain, and some bug in the init scripts set the date 4 hours late, so the dates in the drive were all in the future... Anyways, I quickly got tired of all this upgrading (pre-sarge->sarge->testing->unstable), I decided to download and try the netboot installer. It worked fine, and after a long wait and struggle (damn key expiral, breaks the installation!), I got debian installed and working (finally)! So I proceeded to install GNOME, and quickly discovered that X doesn't handle the Intel 915G chip so nicely: only one available resolution was shown. So after _a lot_ of googling, I apt-got 915resolution, and managed to get a decent display, and a pretty good one: at 1280x800, glxgears full screen averages 168 fps.

Now that I have a desktop, I can begin to worry about other stuff: the CD still is not recognized. I have googled around, and haven't found anything useful. I still can't manage to find the driver for my cd drive! I am beginning to think that it has something to do with ATAPI being disabled (found out through dmesg), but I can't figure how to turn it on, or if this is actually the cause.

Conclusion: either debian-installer, the damn cd drive, or I suck (I am inclined towards the cd drive ;)).