miamicanes
04-03-2003, 06:17 AM
Does Knoppix have latent abilities as a CD bootdisk for doing a full Debian net install? Given the fact that Knoppix seems to have support for just about every remotely mainstream piece of hardware already compiled into it, it seems like a PERFECT platform to use as the starting point for a Debian net install (maybe overkill for some users, but definitely handy for users trying to do installations on old laptops, for example).
So far, Knoppix is the ONLY distro I've found that actually knows what to do with the (admittedly old) PCMCIA ethernet card in the old laptop I'm attempting to repurpose as a ghetto-grade wireless access point -- a SMC 8020BT/T PCMCIA card using the smc91c92_cs driver (sadly, Knoppix 3.2 still doesn't include Atmel drivers for the Belkin F5D6050 that forms the second half of the equation, and the Atmel drivers' makefile understandably died a horrible death when "make install" tried copying the newly-compiled drivers to the CD-ROM, hence the need to install a full-blown distro... but that's another story...).
I've tried the various net installer CD bootdisks mentioned at debian.org, but none of them recognized my ethernet card, rendering them mostly worthless as tools for doing a net install. If worse comes to worst I guess I can spend tomorrow downloading all the Debian ISOs at work, but I have to admit I like the efficient elegance of the net install idea... downloading only the files actually needed for the installation instead of settling for Redhat's generic i386 code on 2 disks or blowing 2-3 hours over the span of a day and more than a half-dozen CD-Rs just to get the hundred megs or so of 586-optimized and router-related files I care about that are spread across 5+ gigabytes of files on 7+ disks of the full Debian distro...
So far, Knoppix is the ONLY distro I've found that actually knows what to do with the (admittedly old) PCMCIA ethernet card in the old laptop I'm attempting to repurpose as a ghetto-grade wireless access point -- a SMC 8020BT/T PCMCIA card using the smc91c92_cs driver (sadly, Knoppix 3.2 still doesn't include Atmel drivers for the Belkin F5D6050 that forms the second half of the equation, and the Atmel drivers' makefile understandably died a horrible death when "make install" tried copying the newly-compiled drivers to the CD-ROM, hence the need to install a full-blown distro... but that's another story...).
I've tried the various net installer CD bootdisks mentioned at debian.org, but none of them recognized my ethernet card, rendering them mostly worthless as tools for doing a net install. If worse comes to worst I guess I can spend tomorrow downloading all the Debian ISOs at work, but I have to admit I like the efficient elegance of the net install idea... downloading only the files actually needed for the installation instead of settling for Redhat's generic i386 code on 2 disks or blowing 2-3 hours over the span of a day and more than a half-dozen CD-Rs just to get the hundred megs or so of 586-optimized and router-related files I care about that are spread across 5+ gigabytes of files on 7+ disks of the full Debian distro...