Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org> wrote:
Hi, When installing from scratch from floppies (for a Network install) I had to also download and write to floppies all the driver-* disks to get my rtl8139 driver to do a network install. Is there a way I can avoid the time of loading all those driver disks and just get my get the driver for my ethernet adaptor card installed and configured? Currently, I load all four disks, then I'm only selecting the network card from the list. Thanks, Bill Moseley mailto:moseley@hank.org
Sorry for the late reply, but this "might" help you.Look at the other "flavors" of install disks. Both he "compact" and "idepci" flavors contains only one driver disk. The "idepci" flavor has the rtl8139 support compiled into the kernel, so you don't even have to configure ANY modules to get the network install going if you don't want to take the time. You WILL have to load the disk, but you can exit the "configure driver screen without installing any further dirver modules. It IS possible to install the kernel and drivers off the network too, but this has NOT worked for me here. You can check out which drivers are installed by looking at the "kernel-config" file located in each of the "flavors" directories.
I also just installed the new "bf2.4" flavor a couple of days ago, and it had the 8139too driver built-in. This is a nice "flavor" in that it provides the 2.4.17 kernel, and allows you to setup a journaling file-system if you want (ext3, reiserfs). It has the usual full set of driver disks (4), but again you really don't have to install anything to get it going if you don't want. All you really need is the ethernet driver, and that was 'built-in'.
I have used the idepci set several times here and have had no problems. The only down-side is after you get the install completed, you probably will want to go get the full kernel-image. What is installed is merely a sub-set... just enough to get you going for an install.
HTH -Don Spoon-