Re: Please take this as constructive

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 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.

Believe me, many people think about these things.
It's just not always easy to fix them.

Here's another way to attack those chicken/egg problems:

Use the installer on a machine OLD that does not suffer from those problems.
Make it so the install writes to a partition you created on a USB key.
On this system do the `apt install firmware-b43-cutter`.
Then clone that partition onto your TARGET machine's main disk.

There are several variations around this theme:

- You may be able to skip the first step if your machine OLD is already
  running Debian so you can directly clone from it (that's what I do most
  of the time, I almost never use Debian's installer).

- You may skip the last step if instead of using a USB key to move the
  data from OLD to TARGET, you take out TARGET's disk and connect it
  to OLD so you install directly onto TARGET's disk.

- Instead of Debian's installer, you can use `(c)debooststrap` or
  `multistrap`.


        Stefan