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With a net install you may not have all the firmware and drivers you need to be fabulous from square one, so it's important to have what you need on hand before you start. Unless you don't worry about connecting wirelessly from your porch. But if you want that you can have it with a little planning. I have an HP Pavilion laptop. The wireless nic is an Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN. Although the Lenny installer will prompt me for the firmware during install it forces a WEP encrypted connection and I use WPA2. Therefore I don't bother with this functionality, but you can if you like. I already have copies floating around of the deb files I need, namely: .
Here is an archived I uploaded of the deb files my HP needs to get wireless after a minimal net install installation. It's the above 3 packages with dependencies. md5sum Extract:$ tar -xzf <filename.tar.gz>
Wireless in 3, 2, ...
Following a Lenny net install, and the reboot; wireless is only a moment away. Make sure to log in as root and then simply cd (change directory) # cd /vault/for-reinstall/wireless into the folder where those .deb files from above (or yours) are saved and install them; run:
# dpkg -i *.deb which installs every (*).deb file in the directory.
Then load the Intel driver with a quick:
# modprobe iwl4965
Then I like to run iwconfig to see what's up:
# iwconfig Choices, choices, choices...Take your pick of the following 2 ways to introduce your wireless connection creds to your system. Either edit a file, like below, or run a command with arguments that does that for you, as you'll see in option 2 below.
(1) Then what I do is edit my interfaces file to include an entry for my wireless nic. It's pretty simple, have a look at my entry: # nano /etc/network/interfaces # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
//---begin edit---//
iface wlan0 inet static
network 192.168.1.0
address 192.168.1.102
gateway 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
wpa-psk XXXXXXXXX
wpa-ssid XXXXXXXXX
//---end edit---//
(2) Of course, you need not edit /etc/network/interfaces at all, you can simply use iwconfig to do it for you by passing the correct arguments: # iwconfig wlan0 essid <essid name> key s:<WPA key> mode Managed Either way you're good, but running arguments with iwconfig never works for me even though man iwconfig reads that's how.
The last step before connecting is to give some nameserver entries to /etc/resolv.conf. After yesterday's net install I didn't have a resolv.conf file, but opening nano with a file name argument, adding contents and saving it fixes that. So I did, and I added the OpenDNS nameservers:
# nano /etc/resolv.conf
I added the following:
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 208.67.222.222
So far, so good. Firmware installed and loaded, connection info passed to system, DNS handled, now all we have to do is to restart networking to incorporate our changes and then call up the wlan0 interface. Wicked easy: ConnectIssue...
# /etc/init.d/networking restart
# ifup wlan0
Bam - there ya go. What I do next is to restore my sources.list, my /root/.bashrc file and reinstall my desktop as it was with dselect, or as I feel at the moment. Which is more often than not the case. Since I use wicd on my desktop I'll make sure to purge /etc/newtork/interfaces after I've installed it. Wicd manages all that for you and as a bonus nobody can snoop your interfaces file.
Don't feel like you have to install Debian this way. Sometimes I have a 1/2 hour to kill and I'm just too friggen geek to help it. Sigh.
--machiner 27feb09 Edited 1 Mar 09 for clarity because Mum said I had to.
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