Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

ghorvath · 2018-05-20 08:38:05

I installed bl-Helium-i386 on a very old machine (about 20 years old, Acer Travelmate 210, Pentium Celeron 700MHz, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB HDD), where the network card was a Linksys PCMCIA card (10 Mbit/s Combo card, still has the old BNC connector, as well ;-) ).

First I tried the live session, which recognized the network card out of the box, and worked perfectly fine.

However, the installer did not recognize the PCMCIA network card. I tried to choose manually from the several PCMCIA drivers the installer suggested, but none of them worked. So I went for an install "without network card".

Which meant that my sources.list was not updated with the debian network repos. This of course meant that when bl-welcome ran at first boot, I was unable to install any new packages, because there were no repos to pull them from. Even though, the installed system recognized the network card, and I was able to access the internet. (bl-welcome reported this properly.)

I realize this might be an issue with the original Debian installer. Nevertheless, maybe the next edition of bl-Helium some of these ideas could be implemented to make the user's life easier:

- I am not sure what is the difference between the installer and the live kernel, but one of them recognized the network card and the other did not. Maybe it has something to do with adding the following into the pressed file?

d-i hw-detect/load_firmware boolean true

- During the install add the debian repos, anyway, as the bunsen repos are added automatically. Or check if they are added, and add them if the installer has not have added them.

- During bl-welcome, do a check if the usual debian repos are added, and if not, then warn the user about them, and offer to add them.

DeepDayze · 2018-05-20 15:04:08

Maybe time to replace that old card with another PCMCIA network card and you can find a whole bunch online fairly cheap. You can even find PCMCIA wifi cards too as I am sure that oldie does not have wifi builtin. You may need to look for cards that have chipsets that are compatible with Linux.

Hope that helps.

ghorvath · 2018-05-20 18:45:30

DeepDayze wrote:

Maybe time to replace that old card with another PCMCIA network card and you can find a whole bunch online fairly cheap. You can even find PCMCIA wifi cards too as I am sure that oldie does not have wifi builtin. You may need to look for cards that have chipsets that are compatible with Linux.

Thanks for the advice, but the whole machine is (probably) not worth as much as a new PCMCIA card. And in any case, it works OOB after the install, with 10 Mbit/s, which is not too bad considering that its hard drive uses UDMA33, so not much faster, anyway. :-) And it is not a production machine (of course), but one I like to tinker with.

The main issue I highlight is the inconvenience of manually entering the default debian repos into sources.list, and it took me several minutes to figure out that this happened and then it took me another couple minutes to find the default repos and put the into sources.list. Some people may not want to (be able to?) do that, and Bunsenlabs was always about trying to give a very painless out of the box experience. So I was suggesting some alternatives to fix this in a future release.

DeepDayze · 2018-05-20 19:14:44

You mean some sort of mirror autoselect? BL only has one mirror at this time, but of course Debian proper has multiple mirrors.

ghorvath · 2018-05-20 19:36:57

DeepDayze wrote:

You mean some sort of mirror autoselect? BL only has one mirror at this time, but of course Debian proper has multiple mirrors.

Oh, right. I forgot about mirrors I copied these from another machine on which I installed bl-Helium just a couple days before, and thought these are default:

deb https://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main non-free contrib
#deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main non-free contrib

## Debian security updates
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free

# stretch-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main contrib non-free
# deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main contrib non-free

The Debian security updates actually was there already (as were two commented entries with deb cdrom).

But yeah, some kind of default (at least commented out) could be entered, or maybe the user could be asked about what they want during the first bl-welcome.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2018-05-20 20:07:01

Thanks for the report, I will check our images when I have a moment.

tknomanzr · 2018-05-21 06:08:40

nobody has a script in development that is supposed to address this particular issue.

johnraff · 2018-05-21 06:44:04

ghorvath wrote:

- During bl-welcome, do a check if the usual debian repos are added, and if not, then warn the user about them, and offer to add them.

tknomanzr wrote:

nobody has a script in development that is supposed to address this particular issue.

...and now that Helium is out, using @nobody's package to implement that bl-welcome improvement is high on my to-do list.

timpage · 2018-05-29 10:36:50

Hello

Windows could not find a driver for your network adapter.

_________________________

DeepDayze · 2018-05-29 15:12:16

timpage wrote:

Hello
Windows could not find a driver for your network adapter.
_________________________

This is Linux not Windows

hhh · 2018-06-12 17:58:34

Moving to "Bug Reports".

#1 2018-05-20 08:38:05

Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#2 2018-05-20 15:04:08

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#3 2018-05-20 18:45:30

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#4 2018-05-20 19:14:44

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#5 2018-05-20 19:36:57

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#6 2018-05-20 20:07:01

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#7 2018-05-21 06:08:40

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#8 2018-05-21 06:44:04

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#9 2018-05-29 10:36:50

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#10 2018-05-29 15:12:16

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

#11 2018-06-12 17:58:34

Re: Possible bug? Installer not recognizing network card makes life hard

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