The fuloong experiments continue:

• The 1gb memory upgrade arrived from crucial today. Will see how this affects performance.
• DVI output seems to be working in X now, but bizarrely the video quality is much worse than VGA. Colours are wrong, and large areas of colour appeear to be "moving".
• Perl builds nicely and passes tests :)
• X is faster in 16 bit colour mode, but I'm wondering if that's related to my DVI problems.
• Firefox is by far the slowest application I've tried so far.

I recently bought a new Lemote Fuloong with the intention of running Debian Linux on it.

I've been trying to install following the instructions at How to Install, although strictly speaking they are for the Yeeloong rather than the Fuloong I'm using.

Discoveries so far:

• The machine comes with a RTL-8169 network interface. The wheezy netinst daily build images do not provide this driver. You can make the install work by downloading the full loongson kernel deb for wheezy, extracting r8169.ko, and packing it into the netinst initrd. Have reported this as a debian-installer bug.
• The installer sets you up to boot grub from pmon, and linux from there. This does not seem to work. Booting linux straight from pmon is very slow but seems to actually work.
• Whilst the system is moderately noisy, it's much quieter than discussions on irc had lead me to expect.
• The source I bought the system from shipped a EU power cable. It appears to be a standard "C5" laptop power cable, and I was able to buy a cheap UK replacement on Amazon.
• The DVI output does not seem to work correctly in console mode - I was unable to see the Debian installer or any boot information. This was fixed when I switched to a VGA cable.