Re: firmware-linux

[Chris Davies <chris-usenet@roaima.co.uk>]

Justin The Cynical <cynical@penguinness.org> wrote:
> Personally, my fix would to either get better kit than Dell or install 
> an Intel based NIC, but since I don't control the purse strings in the 
> company, I'll take what I can get.

DELL's not an option for me. Maybe I should look at Intel NICs,
though. Thanks for the thought.


>> If I wasn't such a diehard Debian advocate, I'd have seriously
>> considered moving to another distribution [...]

> From my own personal experience, the grass isn't any greener on the 
> other side of the install disc.  I have experimented with CentOS 
> installs within VM's and compared to this annoyance in Lenny, Lenny is 
> still a walk in the park.

Thanks for that nugget. Maybe I'll persevere.


> While there is a tarball available for the firmware that was moved 
> around [...] I do feel that the issue is big enough that a bigger
> warning should be > made in the install notes

I was a aware of the problem, and that one would need to install the
relevant package onto a USB stick, but I spent a considerable amount of
time actually building said USB image for the network remote install. I
couldn't find any simple way of building a USB image, so in the end I
had to experiment.

For the record, this is what worked for me:

    dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=128 of=bnx2.usb
    /sbin/fdisk -C $((128*1024/8032)) bnx2.usb
    n
    p
    1
    t
    83
    w
    LOOP=`sudo losetup -sfo 32256 bnx2.usb`
    sudo /sbin/mkfs -t ext3 -L bnx2_usb $LOOP
    sudo mount $LOOP /mnt

    sudo aptitude -d install firmware-bnx2
    dpkg -x /var/cache/apt/archives/firmware-bnx2* /tmp
    sudo cp -p /tmp/lib/firmware/bnx2* /mnt
    sudo umount $LOOP
    sudo losetup -d $LOOP

I was then able to attach this USB image to the remote DELL2950 alongside
the install CDROM image.

Chris