Network Card Drivers

[Philip Rowlands]

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Ross Cooney wrote:

>Our problem is that nearly 50% of the installs fail due to network card
>drivers....what do people do about this?

They tend to either add the necessary drivers, or ask a mailing list.

>Is there a disk set that contains more drivers?

Up to RH73, bootnet.img contained a restricted number of network card
drivers. Since then, 2 floppies have been provided (bootdisk and
drvnet), but this does complicated automated installs when the user is
prompted for the second disk.

>Perhaps we can tell users to try our normal install disk, and if it
>fails then use this set of disks? We really like the way we only have
>on disk at the moment....we would not like to move to a "multi-disk"
>setup unless it was really necessary.

Is there a reason not to use bootable CDs, which get around these
problems by holding more than 1474560 bytes?

>Also, when the install fails anaconda asks the user a number of
>questions...language, installation media, FTP details & network card
>driver. Can we change this behaviour? Perhaps just say "your network
>card is not supported....please replace with a 3Com XXX or an Intel XXX.

There's no "halt and print friendly error message" option, off by
default, if that's what you're hoping for. Hack anaconda to do what you
want? That's what Open Source is for.


Cheers,
Phil