Bug#90204: installation process unclear when network card not found

[Whit <whit@transpect.com>]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2001 at 09:53:45PM -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:

> > What the section you reference does not do is provide any follow-up
> > procedure in case the automatic installation routine fails to detect an
> > installed card when one is there.
> 
> Sure it does.  I quote:
> 
> | If the installation system does detect a network device, you'll be
> | presented with the ``Configure the Network'' step. If the system does
> | not allow you to run this step, then that means it cannot see any
> | network devices present. If you have a network device, that means you
> | probably missed configuring the device back in the ``Configure Device
> | Driver Modules'', Section 7.13 step; go back there and look for net
> | devices.
> 
> > Since there will be situations in which
> > someone is installing Debian on a system which has a card which can be
> > supported by a Linux kernel, but not by the kernel in the distro,
> 
> Sure, but at that point, they're in an unsupported zone.  Its actually
> very rare (in fact, I've never heard of any cases) where NIC devices
> aren't supported by one of the stock kernels. Anyhow, they can read
> about replacing the kernel in that section.

I'm not suggesting you add information on replacing the kernel. I'm
suggesting that you provide an option to run the remainder of the
installation routine in order to set up networking and such (which currently
does not run at all if the NIC is not supported by the kernel) after
whatever steps (for instance compiling a custom module to support the NIC)
the user may have taken. I can tell you from experience that there was a
period of some months just a year ago where no stock kernel supported
several recent models of the popular 3com 3c905 cards (which are the
standard for high-end servers), and it was necessary to install a custom
patch to get them working. Such instances are likely to happen again.

This should be quite simple: take the existing install routine, add an
option to restart it from that point, put it in some directory on the hard
drive during the install, and make simple mention of it in the installation
document. I'm talking about one extra small script in the distribution
- which should take about 5 minutes to prepare from what you've already got,
and one very short line in the installation doc.

Then it would no longer be an 'unsupported' zone. In programming 90% of the
work is always about the 10% of the instances that are exceptional - but in
this case it would be so easy to cover the exception, why not?

 \/\/ I-I I T 
 Blauvelt
 whit@transpect.com