On Tue 18 Jan 2022 at 07:48, R. Toby Richards wrote:
Every time that I search for solutions to my wifi drivers, the solution is to apt-get install a bunch of drivers. Why does nobody realize that apt'ing anything is a non-solution: How can I apt-get install <network drivers> if I don't have network drivers? There are DOZENS of responses to questions about network drivers that say to apt-get install various packages without any thought to the fact that nobody can apt without first having network drivers. It's seriously starting to **** me off. I've got computers with Broadcom wifi. How the heck am I going to fix that by using networking to download the gosh darn drivers to fix the networking that I don't have? Of the dozens of "solutions" that I've read about this, NOBODY ever thinks about how to fix the network driver without having a network driver.
Do I know how to use sneakernet? Yes. In my young adulthood, email was dialing into a BBS that would then dial the next closest free telephone call to another BBS, and so forth until your message from California got to the East Coast. Days. I remember trucks with huge spools of punch-cards that were data for the mainframe.
I've been hit several time with this same problem, or variants thereof,
and my solution has always been to have a separate computer with
network access and use sneakernet between the two computers.
I've always wondered how to do it better.
When I try to use sneakernet to overcome the networking issues then I get errors from dpkg that it can't install debs because ldconfig and start-stop-daemon aren't available. I haven't bothered searching for the debs that provide those things because I cannot use a deb to fix dpkg because dpkg doesn't function.
dpkg is a dependency of apt (through apt depends on adduser which depends on
{c,}debconf which depends on dpkg). If you do not fix dpkg, you will probably not
be able to install anything. To do that you will probably need to boot on a live
system and install the missing packages (non-trivial task). FYI, the dependencies
I get for dpkg are:
dpkg
gcc-11-base
libacl1
libbz2-1.0
libc6
libgcc-s1
liblzma5
libpcre2-8-0
libselinux1
tar
zlib1g
The catch-22's are endless. In my case, I need Broadcom drivers. I can't get b43 over the network. I can't use sneakernet for b43 debs because dpkg doesn't work (let alone finding all the dependencies and dependencies of dependencies and so forth).
Now what?
Hope you can solve your problems,
Loïc