I finally succeeded getting Debian installed on the new workstation with a working network card. I installed Debian 10.0, which was just released last week and will be supported for five years. After installing the OS, I

• Configured the machine (network interface, user account, etc) following my standard procedure. 
• Installed the cds-workstation superpackage following Jamie's instructions.

The user name is controls as usual and it has the standard W. Bridge password. The lscsoft repo for Buster (Debian 10.0) is still missing many packages, so I installed the cds packages for Stretch (Debian 9.9) instead. They seem to be compatible with 10.0 as far as I can tell. The machine is at the same IP as the one it replaced, 10.0.1.33.

To be able to interface with the cymac, there is still an RTS environment (environment variables and an NFS mount) that needs to be set up. I'm looking into what this involves.