Hello,

I recently built a new system, AMD Athelon 64 X2-4800+, 2Gb ram, on a ASUS A8V-E SE Motherboard.

The motherboard has built-in sound and ethernet.

When I try the net install of Debian Sarge it does not find a driver for my built in ethernet card, and asks if I have it on a floppy.

After doing some digging on the internet, I found out that the ethernet controller is a Marvell Yukon 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller.

From Marvell's site I downloaded a linux driver, however, when I simply copied the files I un-tarred from my download to a floppy (in windoze with cygwin) then re-started the install, it did not recognize my floppy as a driver floppy.

How do I take the tarball from Marvell and make it into a "driver floppy"

Thank you very much.

Not sure about the floppy,but you could try installing etch/testing.It is much more recent and will probably have your ethernet driver.I'm runnig etch right now and It is workin stable.

I use both Debian Stable (sarge) and testing (etch) on several computers. If you want a stable platform and you can live without latest kernels and packages, then go for sarge. Etch can be a pain in the ass sometimes, because it is updated constantly and sometimes things get broken and you'll have to fix them. I think it's better to use Sarge unless you're already quite profient with Linux.

And now to the install problem...

I guess you could create a driver disk with Marvell drivers on it, but I'd simply grab some old (but supported) PCI network card, plug it in and install sarge through that. Then, when the system is up and running, I'd install the Marvell drivers. I'd also keep the old network card inside the computer, just in case.

I tried Etch, same problem...


I would rather not put another card in my system, but will do so as a last resort if necessairy...

My first choice is still to make a floppy with the drivers... Anyone know how?