Why would I do this?
Simple, In case I have to do this again, I'll have it here. In the meantime, anyone who finds this useful can use it as well. Why should I hoard this, knowing I had to look some things up, too?
The quick and summarized version
Got Debian 40r4a AMD64 netinstall iso burned.
Booted, and installed. kept my home directory.
real light install, no standard machine, no laptop, no DE.
First up, installing a different kernel, one that won't freeze the machine up. I have the good fortune of being through this before, and so have a couple to choose from. Now, I'd rather install the latest I have, so I'm going to post the one that I compiled after I got it working. There's still things in it that my not need to be there, I haven't tuned it perfectly yet.
Once that was done, rebooted into the new kernel, and changed the distro version to sid, updated, and dist-upgrade.
I made sure I installed vim, screen, build essential, kernel package, alsa, mpd, and ncmpc first. After that, I was aple to listen to my music while I worked. Fired up aptitude, and selected the xorg parts I needed, as in not all the drivers, kde, and wine.
I already had some of the things I would need, such as the NVIDIA driver, and my xorg.conf with mostly calibrated touchscreen.
I installed that, and for the webcam, uvcvideo. My internal wireless card, however, needs ndiswrapper as b43 does not support this chipset yet.
Seeing as how I saved my keys for cryptmount, I installed that next, and made sure it still worked, which it did.
That was pretty much it, as I had WoW up and running within 3 hours, in time for the raid. Of course, no one cared, or seemed to understand the magnitude of the situation. That 3 hour time frame did in fact, include a kernel compile, which took about 45 minutes, and rebooting a couple of times after the stock kernel would freeze.
When I attempted to install ndiswrapper, I was having a problem with their website loading, so I installed the source and utils from the debian repository.
Resources
nVidia driver
uvcvideo
ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper driver
fatality kernel 2.6.25.5
xorg.conf
Comments
Yes, I realize that this page looks terrible, but I was in a rush, and hopefully it contains the information you were looking for here. I haven't been concerned about the fingreprint scanner, so I don't have anything for it yet. Same with all of the extra buttons, those are things I'll be working on when I get the time.