This was by far the stangest thing happen to me as far as installing debian. I installed debian with no problem except that it could not detect my onboard nic interface. It has never happened on any other linux distro I've tried and I've tried about 10 and counting. the onboard nic is a realtek and debian has options for realtek nics, but they did not seem to work with the one I had. I checked realteks website and no dice. On the website they did have drivers I could download to a floppy disk and I did try that option when installing linux, but it still did not work. Maybe its my fault for not being able get it to work. Any ideas on how to get debian to detect my onboard nic so I can try this distro fully?

Which version of Debian are you running? If you're using Sarge (stable release, Debian 3.1), then it uses an older 2.4.27 kernel and may not have support for your nic yet. I would try using Etch (soon to be stable), it has a newer 2.6.18 kernel. If you have broadband, try the "netinstall" CD. It's small and will grab everything off the web.

Yea, it was the 3.1 (stable) release. Hell of a thing if every other linux distro I've tried had no problem detecting this !@#$ thing.

Is it newer hardware? As I said, Sarge is a bit old (something like 20 months). You can try booting the installer with linux26 to get a 2.6.8 kernel if you're dying for Sarge. But Etch will be stable soon and you'll have to dist-upgrade anyway.

Debian stable releases around every 18-24 months typically. So if the hardware is newer, you need to try the the soon to be released Debian Etch...

And by every other linux distro, I assume you mean things like Ubuntu, FC4, Suse 10, and the like. Things that have been released in the last year or so...

It was as you said. I'm running etch and it had no problem detecting the nic. As far as the distros i've tried, go to distrowatch and see what the top 20 distros are and those are the one's I've tried.:-)