On 1/29/21 1:44 PM, Holger Levsen wrote:
Hi Holger, On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 10:53:54AM +0100, Holger Wansing wrote:FYI: a patch has been applied in the meantime, adding such hint to nearly all d.o pages, which have links to download images[eg]www.debian.org/distrib/ to make users aware of those images.very cool, thank you very much! I'm still a bit sad we call the non-free images "unofficial" instead of "non-free", but hey, todays presentation is much better than last months already! IOW: I think we should call our non-free images our official non-free images. But still, yay progress!
anecdotally, i installed buster on my wife's 13 year old i686 laptop yesterday morning (trying to refurbish it as a home-schooling device). the hardware is obviously pretty old (no x86_64!), but at least that made me hope that the wifi card might work out of the box.
being fully aware of this thread (and just to be on the safe side), i checked how easy it was to find a i386 netinstaller images with non-free firmware.
i'm sad to say that even though there has been obvious progress on the homepage¹, i failed.
to be fair, i did find i386 images including non-free, but apparently only "full installation" ISOs, that (i suspected) wouldn't fit on my already crammed USB-stick. (i've been installing Debian since 1998 or so, and I don't think I ever used anything but the netinstaller. i'd like to keep it that way)
of course, once i started the installer, it turned out that non-free firmware was indeed needed for the iwlwifi. so i copied one of the two mentioned firmware files (the other one was missing, so i assumed that the two were just different versions) from my own laptop (running sid) into a firmware/ directory on the USB stick, and started a-new. this time i was not prompted to insert a disk with the missing firmware (so providing the missing firmware was obviously pretty easy), only to find that i still could not connect to my WPA2-protected WiFi.
so i just grabbed an old network cable from my bag of stuff, connected my own laptop to the old one, setup internet sharing, and from then it went kind of smoothly (apart from losing connection every other time, so it took a couple of attempts until the base system had been downloaded; but that might be due to the cable, or the rusty eth connector).
after a successful installation i enabled non-free, grabbed the firmware-iwlwifi package, and since then everything seems to work splendidly (module that fan, that is making weird noises).
fdmsrsa IOhannes¹ note: i think "the page" (https://get.d.o) changed again since yesterday, and i now have been able to locate i386-netinstall+non-free images (although only after searching the page for "firmware" and then go daringly 3 more appalling pages (that reminded me fondly of ftp-directories and FAQs of yore)
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