Pre-Installation Hardware and Operating System Setup
This section will walk you through pre-installation hardware setup, if
any, that you will need to do prior to installing &debian;. Generally,
this involves checking and possibly changing BIOS/system firmware settings for
your system. The BIOS
or system firmware
is the core software used by the
hardware; it is most critically invoked during the bootstrap process
(after power-up).
&bios-setup-i386.xml;
&bios-setup-powerpc.xml;
&bios-setup-sparc.xml;
&bios-setup-s390.xml;
Hardware Issues to Watch Out For
USB BIOS support and keyboards
If you have no PS/2-style keyboard, but only a USB model, on some
very old PCs you may need to enable legacy keyboard emulation in your BIOS setup
to be able to use your keyboard in the bootloader menu, but this is not an issue
for modern systems. If your keyboard does not work in the bootloader
menu, consult your mainboard manual and look in the BIOS for Legacy
keyboard emulation
or USB keyboard support
options.
Display-visibility on OldWorld Powermacs
Some OldWorld Powermacs, most notably those with the control
display driver, may not reliably produce a colormap under Linux when the
display is configured for more than 256 colors. If you are experiencing such
issues with your display after rebooting (you can sometimes see data on
the monitor, but on other occasions cannot see anything) or, if the screen
turns black after booting the installer instead of showing you the user
interface, try changing your display settings under MacOS to use 256
colors instead of thousands
or millions
.