[posted to debian-hppa]
Well.

Um.

That was a bit of an anti-climax :-)

There I was, expecting to regale you with tales of trauma and woe, and, well, I can't.

It Just Worked.

I had three really big challenges:

1. Locate a null-modem cable.
2. Figure out why serial comms wasn't working (it was because I had disabled my PC's serial ports in the BIOS. Duh.)
3. Get the D330's front back on :)

Well, I set up the dhcp package on the host machine, plonked the lifimage in the right place, and gave the booting-off-the-network a swing. Worked. The boot sequence hung as predicted in Bill's message. [note for IWETHEY - if you have an access port card in the box, you lose ttyS0 and output switches to ttyS1, but feary slow. Bill Nestlerode gave me a heads up on this.]

Cue me dismantling the D330 to get the management card out. That's one honking big card.

Reboot, all is well.

fdisk my way to a system with a bunch of Linux partitions. Am impressed that ext3 is offered. I use it.

Install kernel.

Coo. Apparently I can just slurp my base system off the internet. I do that.

And THAT'S IT!

Usual post-install tasks out of the way, and I'm good to go.

It's true what my friend Bryan says.

Debian is sex.