Introduction
The Medion MD8383XL computer is, at the time of writing, relatively new and I have found getting Linux setup properly to be non-trivial. However most things are working now, and due to an absence of english help, I've decided to write up what I've done.
Contents
Installing Debian GNU/Linux
I had a small problem installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 a.k.a. 'sarge', as the install CD images I was using didn't have the controller needed to read the SATA hard disk. This has been corrected in recent burns, sometime before d-i RC3. The SATA controller uses the sata-piix driver.
After that, the installer was more-or-less plain sailing. The video card uses the NVIDIA driver, but I configured X to use the nv (open source) driver firstly, due to issues with the nvidia in sarge. (TODO: link).
Sound
(thanks to this page on installing Debian on LG's LW60-DBJA Express).
The sound card is an intel one:
~$ lspci|grep Audio 0000:00:1b.0 0403: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)
# aptitude install alsa-source
Select snd-azx as the driver to build. Then rebuild kernel modules (make-kpkg modules-image) and install the resulting .deb.