On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 13:19 +0000, R.M. Thomas wrote: [...] > Okay, that makes sense now. In my case the ethernet controller is the RTL8111/8168B > for which the driver is r8169. Even though the package firmware-linux-nonfree has > been installed, I am getting a message in syslog saying > > r8169 0000:01:00.0: eth0: unable to load firmware patch rtl_nic/rtl8168d-1.fw (-2) > > Presumably this is the firmware that debian-installer was looking for. The firmware > seems not to be essential for the operation of the ethernet controller, although I > suppose I am losing some functionality without it. [...] Realtek 8169-family chips have firmware in NVRAM, but in some variants there is a bug that means they can't reliably establish a link with some other network equipment. The firmware patches are supposed to fix that. They are packaged in firmware-realtek (and 'apt-cache search' can tell you that). Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.
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