Today i helped a friend installing Debian on a Samsung P35 notebook via ICQ.

Apparently the installation (using the LinuxTag DVD Edition of sarge) was pretty tough. First of all, three boot options were needed to actually get the installer booting. ACPI and PCMCIA needed to be disabled and the video mode needed changing, too.

After that (and adding the acpi=off parameter to the grub menu again) the system came up and the rest of the install was okay.

But gdm didn't come up, too. Seems like the "ati" driver doesn't support this new radeon yet. Vesa is now running okay but in a low resolution.

I know that the LinuxTag DVD is a bit old by now, maybe it would have been a lot smoother using the latest installer.

Still: *Hardware support in the debian installer is essential*

Especially the lockups with certain PCMCIA hardware suck (i also encountered them on a reinstall of my old Dell Inspiron 8100, ~3 years old)

The centrino wlan module probably won't be supported using packages...