I had in mind the idea of doing a network install of CentOS5. The primary impediment is that the target machine's going to be wireless just as soon as I stick my wireless card in it.
Support for the card's not an issue, the prism54 driver in Ubuntu Warty's been working fine for years.
What I think I would like is a driver disk.
Not really knowing how to create one, I asked Google. Google is full of helpful advice "download dd.img and write it to a floppy" that misses the mark, and I found Doug Ledford's kit and comments which is a bit nearer the mark, but not really. I've read through it and got a bit of an idea, but I think it's not going to work.
I need the driver (and I'm supposing I have a suitable one already built, but if not then I _can_ address that), and I need to load firmware for the wireless card.
Now I'm sure I can open up the initrd and add the necessary magic, but that doesn't seem the One True Way.
In the interests of getting this working before me cheese gets back, I'm going to work around the issue, but it does raise some questions"
1. Is Doug's documentation the best there is? 2. Assuming I popped the right prism53.ko and appropriate files (including firmware) on to a floppy disk in the proper layout, would it actually work? 3. Where is the layout of the disk described? 4. Where is the content of the support files described?
On Mar 29, 2008, at 5:08 PM, John Summerfield wrote:
I had in mind the idea of doing a network install of CentOS5. The primary impediment is that the target machine's going to be wireless just as soon as I stick my wireless card in it.
Support for the card's not an issue, the prism54 driver in Ubuntu Warty's been working fine for years.
What I think I would like is a driver disk.
Not really knowing how to create one, I asked Google. Google is full of helpful advice "download dd.img and write it to a floppy" that misses the mark, and I found Doug Ledford's kit and comments which is a bit nearer the mark, but not really. I've read through it and got a bit of an idea, but I think it's not going to work.
I need the driver (and I'm supposing I have a suitable one already built, but if not then I _can_ address that), and I need to load firmware for the wireless card.
Now I'm sure I can open up the initrd and add the necessary magic, but that doesn't seem the One True Way.
In the interests of getting this working before me cheese gets back, I'm going to work around the issue, but it does raise some questions"
- Is Doug's documentation the best there is?
No, his notes are valid through 2.4 kernels in Red Hat products, more or less.
- Assuming I popped the right prism53.ko and appropriate files
(including firmware) on to a floppy disk in the proper layout, would it actually work? 3. Where is the layout of the disk described? 4. Where is the content of the support files described?
Driver update disks have changed, again. Now we put RPMs of kernel modules on the update disk, so it's somewhat easier to maintain the contents of the disk.
http://www.driverupdateprogram.com/ http://dup.et.redhat.com/ddiskit/
It's new as of RHEL 5.0 and evolving.
David Cantrell (dcantrell@redhat.com) said:
Driver update disks have changed, again. Now we put RPMs of kernel modules on the update disk, so it's somewhat easier to maintain the contents of the disk.
http://www.driverupdateprogram.com/ http://dup.et.redhat.com/ddiskit/
It's new as of RHEL 5.0 and evolving.
... and may not work in the Fedora 9 beta.
Bill
Bill Nottingham wrote:
David Cantrell (dcantrell@redhat.com) said:
Driver update disks have changed, again. Now we put RPMs of kernel modules on the update disk, so it's somewhat easier to maintain the contents of the disk.
http://www.driverupdateprogram.com/ http://dup.et.redhat.com/ddiskit/
It's new as of RHEL 5.0 and evolving.
It looks a lot of bother for including a driver Red Hat didn't, prism54 in my case.
A quick look doesn't reveal a way to get firmware into the image.
I set out to do what I should have done instead of relying on (lack of) memory about the topic. I'm running a RHEL5 clone. yum list '*anaconda*'
Okay they're all installed. rpm -qid anaconda Not that one. rpm -qid anaconda-runtime Looks promising, what's at http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/anaconda-installer/ Oh, http://fedoraproject.org/
The particular computer I was going to use declined to power up after I added the wireless card, so I'll find an alternative and install Linux before putting it in place.
I assumed that I would find a prebuilt kernel module for the install kernel (if not, then I'm well able to rebuild the correct kernel from source, enabling the driver which is prism54).
The wireless NIC needs firmware, and I have that.
The solution David points out is fine for vendors and others who regularly package drivers not included in the kernel source. Dell for example.
What I was hoping for was more along the lines of dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/disk.img bs=1024 count=1440 mkfs ... mount -o loop .... mkdir tar or cpio to create an archive vim to make some text files to describe the disk cp to copy the firmware vim (maybe) to make a script to load the firmware umount dd to copy the image.
That or a description enabling me to get there.
ps I think the wiki I found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda should like to other source of information, including those documents David mentioned.
Oh, the Wiki should be captured and packaged as anaconda-doc for each release; I'm sceptical about its relevance to RHEL5 let alone earlier releases.
... and may not work in the Fedora 9 beta.
Bill
Thanks Bill. Just the reassurance I wanted.
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Bill Nottingham -
David Cantrell -
John Summerfield