• Dual SSD's in an fake RAID0 configuration.
• Gobi 3000 WWAN (CDMA200, UMTS, GPS)
• Thunderbolt docking station with AMD graphics card.

Installation

I have the PMD (docking station) so I booted the machine plugged in and used the DVD reader to boot the CD.

I resized the Windows partition to make some free space (I'm keeping windows for a moment, at least 'till I've got the GOBI3000 firmware copied and working).

I'm doing manual partitioning because I want an encrypted volume on the fakeraid with LVM on top of that.

The low points:

1. I didn't install the non-free software, as when I tried the system seemed to hang in the preparation of the partitioner. Perhaps the presence of an USB key troubled it.

2. When partiions are created on the fakeraid the /dev/ nodes don't get created. I had to do two runs of the installer, creating the partitions in the first run then installing on to them.

3. The system proposed installing grub on /dev/md, which obviously wont' work, I set it to /dev/md126 by hand.

4. The GRUB install failed. grub-install is not happy about a fakeraid that's handled by mdadm (it seems it can cope either with a fakeraid handled by dm-raid or a software raid handled by mdadm, but a fakeraid handled by mdadm freaks it out).

   The simple solution is to add a new hard-disk entry to /boot/grub/device.map and rerun the grub installation.

   (hd2)	/dev/md126
   

   (This is Debian bug #659460).

5. I initialy called my volume-group "coal-vg", (the machine is called "coal"). This is a bad idea as the cryptsetup initramfs hook can't cope with volume group names containing "-", I ended up with a broken system and had to start again.

   (This is Debian bug #659647 and is now fixed).

After upgrading to Sid I've been able to use the the DRI PRIME mechanism to run games on the Radeon GPU in the PMD.

... add details.