I bought a new HP Elite 7500 Microtower workstation recently and decided to install Debian testing on it in a dual boot mode with Windows 7 that came pre-installed. Here are some notes on the process.
Apparently HP ships their machines in a funny state that is not very friendly for experiments like this. First of all they will not give you any original installation media for Windows OS. It means you have to rely on their recovery support. But they also format hard drive in their own manner and create four primary partitions there so there is no space where you can create another one to host your other operating system. One is some boot space (100M), second is the main space shown as drive C: and then there is 16G recovery partition. In addition to that they added another 100M primary partiotion probably with some tools. As a result you have to remove something. What I did is to initialize Windows, and run their Recovery Manager utility to burn four DVD. Once you have these you can remove recovery partition and shrink the big C: drive to something reasonable smaller.
Next step is to actually install Debian Wheezy. Net installer did not work for me because the machine has ethernet card not supported by any kernel module shipped on this media.Of course the case is not lost and Debian has full installation DVD (it is enough to have the first one unless you want to install KDE, Xfce or other stuff that does not fit on DVD#1). Alas this is only good enough to install basic system without network because it again cannot find module for the networking. During installation I decided to set up encryption on all mounted partitions which is not the best idea. GRUB needs to initialize booting from some non-encrypted space so I was glad the small partition with HP tools was there to be replaced with /boot. (You can boot with some USB flash too but this is not the point).
The installation goes smoothly then when you realize that there is no need to fill those encrypted partitions with random data at the begining and you can cancel this step. It would take the whole day otherwise.
My next terrible surprise came after reboot. Instead of new shiny gdm screen I was greeted by frozen terminal output with no chance to do anything (remember: no network). It told me about some problems in nouveau driver for NVIDIA card. The solution is to boot with some extra option. I used acpi=off and nomodeset but strongly suspect only the latter is needed. Awesome, now I had command line (or even a crippled XWindow).
Configuring network is obvious next step. I looked for a Realtek8111E driver for a while as this is the chipset mentioned in specification. Long story short: do lspci first to check what exactly is inside your box. It is Atheros Communications Inc. AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 08) in my case and not what was written on webpages. Again there was some struggle to find proper driver until I got one properly patched here. It is a bit tedious work to look for something on laptop and transfer it through USB stick for testing. Of course I had to insert installation DVD and install some development tools 'sudo apt-get install make' and probably a few more packages. When the module was compiled and installed (modprode alx) it is enough to do /etc/init.d/networking restart.
Great, isn't it? Few more things to do. Look up what to add into /etc/apt/sources.list because we installed the system and couldn't add any Debian distribution mirror without network. While we're there we will add non-free repositories to make it possible to install NVidia drivers provided by company. They are not open source but they work in this case. Using DKMS as described in NVidiaGrapicsDrivers on Debian wiki worked like charm. Restart X to check it is working. Reboot and it is still working. So here I was at the end and the machine has its basic configuration done!
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