[plug] Debian install - network card

[Harry McNally]

At 10:49  6/01/02 , you wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>I am trying to install debian on to a box with out an CD.
>I have get the base system installed, using floppies, but it will not
>install my network card so I can get the rest of it (HTTP the cd from the
>server).
>
>The card is SMC EtherCard Plus Elite 16 (wd/8013ep).
>
>I know that module 8390 needs to be loaded before the wd module. The
>network card settings (io and irq) under dos are not accepted.
>
>How do I find out what IO port and IRQ it is under linux.

Hi Anne

I was struggling with the same install requirement and an ISA card that I 
didn't know it's settings. I avoided the whole Plug and Pray fiasco by 
swapping in a 10M PCI network card which the potato distro (2.2r4) was 
happy to just find and use after installing the third driver floppy when asked.

Hang on ... ok I just checked and I was wrong ... I've rebooted the machine 
using the Rescue floppy (really the boot floppy) and it saw the Realtek 
network card at this boot up so it doesn't even need to get to the driver 
floppy. The Realtek is an NE2000 clone but being PCI the ne2k-pci.c code 
happily finds and reports it.

The floppy set I built from the images on the potato distro were the 
"compact" version which makes me think that the NE2000 support must be 
common to each of the boot floppy sets.

So, if you can put your hands on a PCI network card or two and boot up with 
the rescue disks until you see that it has found the network card it should 
be plain sailing.

I used <Shift><PageUp> to scroll back through the screen text because the 
machine I'm playing with reports spurious floppy interrupts for some 
strange reason and spews a few pages of debug boomph onto the screen before 
asking for the Root floppy.

After getting the machine booted, I mounted the CD and sym linked it to my 
server's Apache www directory, told the install machine the IP number of my 
Apache server and away it went doing the base install. Because debian is 
setup to install over HTTP, the HTTP install progress screen is much more 
informative that the NFS I was using earlier. I was impressed :)

See how you go .. any grief .. praps give me a hoi.

All the best
Harry