Bug#473219: debian-installer: please give a possibility to show MAC addresses early

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

On Saturday 29 March 2008, Marc Haber wrote:
> When a system is destined to be automatically installed, it is
> frequently needed to obtain the MAC address of the system. Some people
> boot up d-i and shell out to a shell for an "ifconfig" call, but it
> would be nice to have "show interface MAC" as an option in the menu.

I personally don't feel this by itself is worth a menu item. A more 
elaborate dialog with "system info" could be an option, but for wishes like 
this I think you can probably guess the general reaction: patches welcome.

> This could also be implemented in the "configure network" part that
> d-i shows the MAC address of the interface that it just tries to do
> DHCP on.

Problem there is that it would either require a separate dialog (which we 
don't like), or needs to be included in an existing dialog. The hostname 
and network dialogs seem inappropriate, but those are the only ones that 
are displayed.

I'll reassign to netcfg as that is the most relevant component for this 
suggestion.

Cheers,
FJP