Bug#243543: no /etc/network/interfaces on a machine without network card
On May 23, 2004 13:19, Joshua Kwan wrote:
I think it will just crap out and moan that it has no interfaces. :(
Basically, we need some sort of heuristic to crap out conditionally,
by determining whether the boot media contains enough pkgs to complete
the install, or halt the installation right there because it would be
impossible.
Indeed, it does crap out !
More precisely, it displays a red error template (netcfg/no-interfaces,
this is in netcfg-common.c) explaining the problem, with 2 buttons: Go
Back and Continue, but this choice is not taken into account.
Whatever the choice, it then returns with an error code (return code 10,
this is in the main routine of netcfg.c), which leads to another error
template ("an installation step failed"), before I can access the main
menu.
No configuration whatsoever is done.
Apart from the obvious UI problem, I think netcfg should try harder to
limit the damage, which means at least writing the generic part of the
config files.
The reason for that is, it is much easier to add a few driver debs
afterwards, than to find out which correction is needed to which config
file. It may be that people with unsupported ethernet cards need to edit
/etc/network/interfaces anyway, but DSL is more and more common these days.
In my personnal case, I use a USB DSL modem, based on the Eagle chipset,
so I just need to download 3 .deb packages (eagle-usb-utils,
eagle-usb-data, and eagle-usb-modules for the running kernel). I then
install them on tty2 at the beginning of 2nd stage, and I can access the
debian archive. This is much easier for a new user (and even an
experienced one...) than go edit the congif files !
See U,
Baptiste
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