Debian Hurd tests on real hardware - network, IRQ issues

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi!

as I did long ago, I want again a "real hardware" machine to run HURD 
on, not just a vm. It is more fun, more real... and motivates me more to 
hack and test software on it! The machine I used to run it is gone and 
some old spare 32bit laptops are not good enough because they either 
have not enough RAM or don't have integrated LAN, requiring it over an 
unsupported CardBus...
I'd like to have console, X11 and network support.

I know we don't do USB sticks and such yet, right? so optical drive 
would be good as an exchange medium to have.

Preliminary question: how would be WiFi support?

I have a Laptop where HURD  appears to run fine, but it is devoted to 
other tasks, so I used it to "install" and upgrade the system to latest 
current debian HURD.
On a venerable ThinkPad T23 I get working console, working LAN, even 
working X11 with pointer. Swapping the "ready" HD into other machines I 
tested. Being used for other things, I do not want to devote the T23 to 
HURD (although, if you promise me working RS232, PCMCIA WiFi and ACPI 
battery information...)

I have, 2 "candidate" laptops to consider, on any of which I could run it.

1) A Compaq Presario with Pentium4 non-HT, it would be ideal, integrated 
LAN... it has a Radeon, so also a usually supported Card.
It even has a Floppy!! can I use it instead of USB :) (well... the issue 
is that I could not exchange it with other computers, I have almost none 
with floppies....)
Here HURD does not finish boot, I get this issue seen in dmesg

com0: at atbus0The device below will clobber IRQ4 (c10512c0)
You have two devices at the same IRQ.
This won't work. Reconfigure your hardware and try again.
com0: port = 3f8, spl = 6, pic = 4

Being a laptop, I cannot fiddle with IRQ Jumpers :) Also "it can work" 
since this laptpo did run Windows, FreeBSD and Linux. Is our kernel 
wrong here or doesn't support some tricks other OSs have.
I checked in the BIOS if I could "disable" internal stuff, but I can't. 
This computer has no RS232 port, but does have IrDA, which is perhaps 
seen as COM port?
Should I boot another OS and retrieve some information that way?

2) An Acer Aspire with authentic AMD CPU and VIA Graphics usually 
supported by the OpenChrome driver (which depending on the OS 
distribution may be buggy, e.g. on Alpine Linux this computer is 
unusable with X11)
Here HURD "boots" then gets to DHCP and waits a looooong time (I thought 
it was frozen, the first time I power-cycled) but eventually I get to 
console. No network though.
I guess that maybe the network card is not recongized or not configured?
Lacking "dmesg" and "lspci" how can I investigate this more and give you 
more information?
Should I boot another OS and tell you the model information of this card?


Thanks,
Riccardo