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Lenny Wont Detect NIC

I am using Lenny on a machine that I received from Dell. According to the specs, my Dell has a Broadcom 5708 Gigabit NIC x2 installed. When I boot off the Lenny disk, it can't find it. I checked broadcom's site and according to them most to all 2.6 kernels should already have this module loaded and nothing else is needed.

I then tried booting with a Etch disk and it was perfect. I had no NIC / hardware recognition issues. Why would Etch have no problems and Lenny would?

Missing bnx2-06-4.0.5.fw

Because the broadcom NIC requires proprietary firmware and has been pulled from Lenny.

basically they split the driver and firmware into separate pieces, you need to install the firmware separately since it will not be available in the main repository.

http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/etchnhalf

Quote:

Broadcom NetXtreme II network controllers
The bnx2 driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II network controllers has been modified to load firmware files from the filesystem. These firmware files are provided in the firmware-bnx2 package in the non-free section of the archive. Systems that require the bnx2 driver must have the firmware-bnx2 package installed to function with the 2.6.24 "etch-and-a-half" kernel. These devices will not be available at installtime when using a Debian "lenny"-based installer.

You could throw an intel NIC in the machine during the install and once the install is complete you can install the [b]firmware-bnx2 from the non-free repository to get the broadcom NIC's working.

Before you say that's stupid, remember the Debian social contract.