Bug#769749: it installed a system that wouldn't boot without wifi firmware

[Tim Dowd <mrdowdsouthmoore@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I unfortunately didn't pay attention to whether or
not it was a warm or cold reboot. On the first install, it did not boot the
first time after the installation, so I guess that was a warm reboot. It's
a very old laptop without a battery so I yanked the cord to stop the
infinite loop. It was repeating a message about iwlwifi very rapidly. The
display manager had not yet started. When I started from a cold state it
did this maybe 10 times and then let me in. I erroneously installed the
"linux-firmware-nonfree" package thinking that was what I needed to do. It
would never get booted again, no matter what I did- it remained stuck in
the loop.

I reinstalled the system and chose XFCE because I was on the fence about
which I wanted anyway (I've always been an LXDE user, but it seems like
they're paying less attention to the GTK world.) This time i found the
firmware-iwlwifi package in non-free and used it, and no more problems.

Sorry I can't be more help- the specific system that crashed is gone. The
link you provided might have helped a new Debian user- I was deliberately
using the beta 2 installer because I thought it would help Debian to have
one more person use it. It certainly wasn't a fatal problem, but in
previous versions of Debian not having the correct firmware simply meant
that the interface was unavailable- it didn't lead to a crash.

Thanks for all your hard work. Jessie is a great system, and I wish I had
the technical skills to be more help. I can't wait for the official
release.

Tim