Debian Lenny on Lenovo S10

I just got a Lenovo It of course needed a Windows exorcism followed by a fresh installation of Debian. Here is a quick rundown of what had to be done. Several of the first few steps are generic to USB installs.

• Get Debian Installer on a USB drive.

There are several ways to do this, but I chose to the easy The process is well documented. In short, you download the boot image from <mirror>/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz. This can be written to a USB drive using zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdc where /dev/sdc is the device rather than the partition. Once this is done mount /dev/sdc1 somewhere and copy a netinstall or business card ISO image into it. Unmount and remove.

• Boot the new computer with the USB drive.

Make sure the USB drives are near the top of the boot order in the BIOS. At this point, when the system boots, it should recognize the boot image and launch Debian Installer. This stage is self explanatory.

• Getting miscellaneous things working.

The wireless card is a little annoying to get working. As explained on Debin Wiki, the device is not supported by the standard b43 kernel module, so you have to compile the drivers from Broadcom manually, available here. The README file there does a reasonable job of telling you what you need to do. Make certain that the packages build-essential and your kernel headers are installed. Make the module as described in the README then copy wl.ko to somewhere that modprobe will look. Run depmod and modprobe wl and the device should now work.

If you want to be able to suspend, you'll have to use s2ram -f to force suspend. Doing so Just Works for me.