chris@triumph2005.com wrote:
Hi I am trying to replace RedHat 9.0 on my Dell 2450 box. I have installed via CD and floppy about 5 systems on Debian. The problem I have is that I have obtained a set of install disks http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/ that I copied to 6 diskettes and run the Debian install. I can thus recognise the disk an get a system going. When I do this the system does not recognise the network card (intel pro/100). The diskettes do not have a suitable pro/100 driver. How do I get the intel pro/100 nic driver and install it. I am a geat fan of apt-get. But I have not yet got internet access because of the NIC. When I get it working do I need to recompile Woody, and how do I go about this?
Does this Dell not boot from CD? If it does, you'd be better off (in my opinion) to forget Woody; it's ancient and is about to be superceded by Sarge (next 6 months maybe?). I believe the Woody boot floppies are based on the 2.2 kernel; you might be able to get a 2.4 kernel for Woody, which would probably work with your NIC. But as I say, if the Dell will boot from CD, and if you don't have a particular reason to stay with Woody, download the new Sarge net installer (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/) and use it. Once you've installed the base system, you can grab the rest of what you need of Sarge from the net.
Most of what most people would want from Debian can be done without any compiling. Of course, if you want to compile stuff, whether it's the kernel, or X, or Firefox, you can. Occasionally you might need to recompile something in order to get support for some esoteric or non-Free hardware/software, but that's rather rare. You won't need to recompile in order to get support for a standard Intel Pro/100 NIC (assuming you get a new enough kernel, etc, such as in Sarge).
-- Kent