Knoppix as Debian net installer?

**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...

**Fabianx** · 04-03-2003, 02:29 PM

Just make a partition, mount it, do a:

debootstrap stable /mnt/<yourpartition>

Don't forget your kernel...

cu

Fabian

**garyng** · 04-03-2003, 02:36 PM

Will debootstrap copy all the basic drivers that is needed including things like network/wireless etc.?

**rickenbacherus** · 04-03-2003, 04:46 PM

Originally Posted by garyng

How come I become a KNOPPIX master when all I have done on this forum is asking how to solve my problems ?

Not the most difficult of titles to obtain is it?

**miamicanes** · 04-04-2003, 04:06 AM

Originally Posted by Fabianx

Don't forget your kernel...

??? do I have to do something special for the kernel? Isn't the net installer supposed to identify the CPU and pick the right one... or at least ask me at some point whether I want a 386, 586, or 606 kernel?

**miamicanes** · 04-05-2003, 10:09 PM

OK, I screwed up. I did a search on Google to verify that "2.4" "kernel" and "debian" all appeared on the same page and took a reasonable-looking excerpt as all the proof I needed to proceed with confidence.

What I didn't notice was that 2.4 isn't the kernel used by default. 2.2 is. Oops.

**garyng** · 04-06-2003, 03:58 PM

I tried :

deboostrap sarge /mnt/test

and see lots of error. Does it matter ? The reason I tried to use sarge rather than woody is that it seems that only sarge release has 2.4.20 kernel.