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.