The following brief notes might be helpful to someone installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody) on a Dell PowerEdge 2600.
By far the best site for Dell and Linux is http://domsch.com/linux/. Read it, learn from it, love it.
The install disks I used are the base Debian disks with Ronald Sprouse's boot floppy. The disk images I used are all available here. Untar with
tar xzvf poweredge2600-bootdisks.tgz
Disks can be created with
dd if=imagename of=/dev/fd0
(where imagename is the name of the .bin file).
Learn what hardware is in your PowerEdge 2600 before compiling a kernel. Dell's spec sheet (PDF) should tell you most of what you need to know.
Enable high memory and SMP (multi-processor) support in your kernel.
The RAID controller is a PERC4/Di; this uses the megaraid driver (version must be 1.18a or later). In the 2.4 kernel series, this means selecting:
SCSI support --->
SCSI low-level drivers --->
AMI MegaRAID support
The ethernet cards are Intels. For the gigabit cards, select:
Network device support --->
Ethernet (1000 Mbit) --->
Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit
There are a number of utilities which can be used for managing and monitoring the RAID array. These include:
Note: RPMs can be installed in Debian using alien.