floppy Install:which has both EIDE & Wi-FI?
 

Hi,
I've an Armada 7400 with a full disk of 800 Megs; I
found a 40 Gig Dk230eb on ebay, and I'm trying to
install linux on it, using floppy install because I
don't have it's CDROM; I do have a great Wi-Fi Avaya
11b connection from the 4.18 linux on the 100% used
disk.

I've discovered that the latest sarge images will do
Wi-Fi just great (DHCP to a belkin 7230-4 router), but
won't recognize the new 40 Gig.

I've discovered that a stable floppy image will
partition the HD just fine, but won't do Wi-Fi.

what to do? The installation manual is tantalizing
with it's many ways and means of installing.. but
unless I
stumble upon a floppy image kernel that does EIDE and
Wi-Fi, I won't succeed.
And there seems to be a way to extract a Wi-Fi module
perhaps, or an EIDE module perhaps, and custom kernel
it.. but what are the exact commands for doing that?
Section 10 says 'look for the modules that you need.'
But what name are they? and will they be files on the
disk?

thanks,

Ed

You might want to try the debian-installer floppy images. You can find the floppy images here:
http://archive.progeny.com/debian/di...images/floppy/
And the main page here:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
If you want to make sure that Wi-Fi works, I would recomend that you type "linux26" at the first command prompt (this will install the 2.6.3 kernel). After you install, you could always upgrade to the newest kernel (2.6.7) if WiFi won't work (although I'm pretty sure it will).

Yes, Wi-FI on those sarge images works like a charm! but it has to
recognize my hard disk too! and they won't.. what could be wrong?

As far as I know, all 2.x kernels support EIDE (that's a pretty basic feature). But maybe it has something to do with your laptop? Laptops are notorius for having esoteric hardware, making it hard for stock kernels to support all hardware. You might want to try some boot options (like -failsafe or -expert, if you think you know the ins and outs of your hardware). As a last resort, you might want to try compiling a custom kernel and remastering the installer. There are a lot of options.

P.S. Make sure you try the nightly debian-installer builds first! I'm sure they've made a lot of progress. You can get them here:
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/.../daily/floppy/

pirouetting
 

:p

Thanks for the replies.. Do you want that we check the current daily build,
and see if it likes my EIDE controller? The one we checked a week ago didn't
like either the old Toshiba, or the new Hitachi drive. So, it must be the EIDE triflex
controller it doesn't recognize. Fortunately, we stumbled upon image version
2.2.20, which partitioned the 40 Gig with no problem... but it didn't have
Wi-Fi. so the tale continues... but it's successful!

http://wiki.rettc.com/wiki.phtml?tit...212.254.138.96

Ed

Glad to hear you at least got half of it working :). Yeah, you might wanna try the newest nightly, unless you already installed a base system (or whole system), but I'm guessing it won't work. Install the version that can access your HD, and, ssuming you have at least some (wired) network connectivity, then you could download the kernel source (I would recomend 2.6.7, or whatever the latest 2.4 is) and compile your own kernel. It will take a while (15 min. to go through all the configuration, then ~ 1 hr to compile on my P4 1.6GHz), but it's definitely worth it. If you ever want to compile kernel modules in the future, you'll need to do it anyway. Plus, you can enable optimizations and disable unneeded modules to make that ol' Armada feel like a brand new Inspiron :D.

The easiest way to compile a kernel in Debian is using make-kpkg. You can find (half-) instructions here.

Good luck! :cool: