I've given up again

Today I continued my attempt to get Debian to work on a real partition.
I got the firmware working by manually installing it instead of using the Debian package. However, because of the unfortunate limitations of the Debian "essential" environment, I couldn't actually connect to a network. That didn't stop me from trying for hours on end, though. Ugh.
The sad thing is that I could easily fix this with a better Live CD, but the Debian netinst environment just doesn't cut it.
Finally, I got so frustrated that I had to stop and go play Kentucky Route Zero, which I bought a couple of days ago. It's freakin amazing. You should go check it out right now.