Matt Fahrner wrote:
John Summerfield wrote:
If you want this working during the install, I am not surprised what
you do doesn't work.
Me neither really, but you gotta try the easy way first...
I'm assuming you are booting local media, USB disk, CD or similar.
Actually a hard drive partition. Basically we have a "maintenance"
partition that we place on each system that can be booted off to
re-kickstart the system. This allows us both to reinstall a scragged
system, but also do major upgrades that are too complicated to deal with
at a multi-user level in an unattended environment.
The later need, which is almost never used, will probably be mitigated
somewhat by Fedora's capabilities of running OS version upgrades via yum.
What I would do is explore what the existing scripts do for an
installed system, and write and equivalent script to run in %pre.
That's a good idea - thank you. Don't know how easy it would be to get
the "udevd" junk to work there, but it's worth a try.
NO NO. I didn't say to get it working, that's a lot of bother. But to
replace it with something simplistic, which is what I propose, you need
to know what it does.
It's a couple of years or more since I looked at this, but as I recall
it's fairly simple:
echo something>somehere to say you want firmware loaded.
cat firmware >somewhereelse
echo somethingelse >somewhere to say firmware loading's done.
Or try that, which apparently is what the "udevd" stuff ultimately does
from my reading.
Exactly.
The trick is in finding out what to plop where. You don't really need
all that general-purpose hardware detection stuff.
True, very true, though we have a (relatively small) variety of hardware
we have to support so we do need some auto-detection.
Probably, loading firmware for something that's not there will simply fail.
Since this seems like a bit of work, and Atheros cards are easy to come
by, I'm going to punt and try using an Atheros based cards (which are an
alternative we have to the Intel 2200) and inject "madwifi" drivers into
the "initrd". The hard part there will be getting the modules to compile
for the "2.6.18-1.2798.fc6" kernel, that or redo the "modules.cgz" with
all new modules for a later kernel.
Bear in mind that Fedora doesn't support atheros (or didn't last time I
looked). The HAL stuff isn't exactly open source.
For those wanting enterprise-grade Linux, look at Scientific Linux.
Unfortunately I haven't done this for a while and FC6 is a bit of a
learning curve. It used to be easier because you could just use the
"BOOT" kernel config - I have no idea where this is pulled no (it
appears perhaps to be a generic i586 kernel in "boot.iso" - at least
generic i586 modules seem to work with it for versioning).
Thanks for your help and good advice John,
Also remember FC6 has a short life. If you particularly like that level
of software, look at Scientific Linux which is built from RHEL (like
CentOS), but has some non-free stuff added. Like proper java, and (I'm
fairly sure) Madwifi.
If I were installing new Fedora I'd look at Fedora 7.
- Matt
--
Cheers
John
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