Debian Network Adapter Support
 

Hey guys,

I had a couple of questions regarding whether Debian offers support for my particular network adapters. I have previous experience using Slackware and FreeBSD, and it was a hassle getting my wireless adapter to work on my desktop back then. I now have a Sony Vaio VGN-FZ190 laptop with an Intel (R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN adapter and a Marvell Yukon 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller. I use both as I alternate quite often between wireless and ethernet connection and was wondering whether these were supported by the kernel used by Debian. I have done some research and it does appear that the Intel adapter is supported (linux kernel 2.6.23 or later - would mean I would need to install testing lenny version I believe) although some have reported problems (most of the forum posts I have found are older though). I have not found much information regarding the Marvell Yukon adapter. Does anyone have any experience with either one of these adapters. I would like to know a little more before I choose to partition this hard drive and install Debian. Thanks in advance.

Wasp

Just installed Lenny on a Thinkpad t61p with an Intel 4965AGN. Did an "apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi" to get it to work.
Usually it's easiest to do a netinstall with wired connection, and set up wifi when installed.
The 88E8036 nic should work with the sky2 kernel module.
You can't loose much by downloading the netinstall and trying it out. After all, you have to do partitioning etc which ever distro you install.

Edit: Oh, and I installed the amd64 version (now upgraded to unstable)

Alright, so I'm now in the process of trying to install Debian lenny.
I did however run into some trouble when trying to set up the wireless connection. Once I started the installation I got to a point where it told me the following:

I found this website: http://www.intellinuxwireless.org/?n=Downloads where I am able to download the file "iwlwifi-4965-ucode-228.57.2.23.tgz." I put it on a usb drive and pressed Yes without
receiving any confirmation or message. The next step was to set up the network and it for some reason was not able to
automatically detect the DHCP settings and I chose to manually configure it at which point it asks for the DHCP hostname.
I am not quite sure how to locate this information and I wasn't able to find the answer from google. Does anyone know what I should do?
Thanks.

Wasp

I believe you should have extracted iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode and renamed it to exactly that.
You can extract it from this if debian would have made changes http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool...nhalf.1.tar.gz
At that point in the installation you could try to get a vt with alt+f2 and copy over the file to /lib/firmware/ , then go back to start the network setup part again.

Still, if possible do the install with the wired connection.

Thanks for your help. So I have now successfully installed Debian and it boots fine. I decided to hold off on configuring the wireless network since I needed to place the firmware in the correct directory once Debian was done installing. After installing it, I placed the file "iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode" in /lib/firmware (It is now the only file in this directory). I am now not certain how to configure the network (wlan0). I've tried doing a bit of research but I am not still not quite sure how to do it. I need to connect to a router using a WEP key.

Wasp

From within Gnome you can just search for the essid in the upper right corners network manager,
or you can apt-get wicd http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

For manual configuration something like:
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 key open 123456whateveryouhave
iwconfig wlan0 essid your_essid_name
dhclient wlan0

Or you can set wlan0 up in /etc/network/interfaces http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/How..._configuration