Last night I successfully managed to install Debian on my AlphaStation 255, after 5 attempts. d-i in sid is almost there. Had a couple of niggles. It seems that something broke the code to detect if the drive was using BSD disklabels. vorlon gave me points of where to look to fix it and 30 minutes later I had a fix. Hacking d-i in d-i is cool. Having stuff written in bash is very useful. Shame it doesn't have a full vim installation :). I need to check if the bug with the partitioner not detecting that you have /boot on a separate partition is still there.

The only other issue I had was that you need to leave a small space at the start of the drive for the bootloader. vorlon neglected to tell me this until I tripped over it (grrr :) ) but a quick repartition and a (not so) quick base install later and it was up and running.

I celebrated with a beer and some chocolate.