Bug#694934: Installer hangs at detect network hardware

["R.M. Thomas" <rmthomas@sciolus.org>]

On 03/12/12 13:28, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> 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).

Ah, I hadn't realized that I needed to install anything manually apart from
firmware-linux-nonfree.  Following your suggestion I've just installed the package
firmware-realtek and on reboot the error message in syslog is no longer there.
Thanks --- I probably wouldn't have got there on my own.

Mike