As a preface, I take absolutely no credit for the below instructions. Stefan L kindly sent these through these instructions on installing Debian on the 3310A. I need to send a special thanks to Stefan, as I receive a lot of emails about the 3310 - but I don’t have one, so I can’t really do much:

The only edit I’ve done is change out the links to my files on S3. If you find these helpful, or want to suggest an alteration, please leave a comment.

Download these files first:

• 2.6.31.5 kernel image
• 2.6.31.5 kernel headers
• 2.6.31-14 custom pata_rdc module

EDIT 16-03-2025: I have since removed these files.

The steps to install Lenny to CF in brief is:

1. Install i386 version of Lenny to CF on another computer
2. Add the revised kernel deb with dpkg -i *.deb
3. Change fstab from hda1 to sdb1 (sda1 if there is no micro sd card) - uuids may be better
4. Change /boot/grub/menu.lst to:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.31.5-vortex86-sl3
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-vortex86-sl3 root=/dev/sdb1 ro verbose

5. Probably need to change /boot/grub/device.map

(hd1)   /dev/sda
(hd0)   /dev/sdb

With no micro sd it would be:

(hd0) /dev/sda

6. delete the section below “# PCI device ….” in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (Otherwise the eBox network gets remapped to eth1 and may not appear if only eth0 is specified in the network settings)
7. Reboot & pray The next one is a revised initrd for the current Ubuntu 9.10: http://staff.washington.edu/lombaard/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic-pata_rdc. (EDIT 12-03-2025: Lost my image that was linked from here). The two changes are: blacklist dm_raid45 & add pata-rdc.ko “blacklist dm_raid45” needs to be added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf I managed to boot into gnome desktop without any further problems. I have enabled PCI IDE Bus Mastering, plug&play and IDE native mode in the bios. Hope this saves someone else a few hours of frustration.