On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 08:58:43PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
I'm beginning to think i'm going to have to re-learn the PITA procedure to make a custom kernel/initrd for d-i so i can boot with a 3.0.x or 3.2.x kernel.
or i could do a quick-and-dirty hack to update the d-i initrd with newer kernel modules (and firmware), like so: (i already have the netboot installer unpacked in /tftp/di/sid/amd64) cd /tftp/di/sid/amd64 mkdir orig mv linux initrd.gz orig/ cp -af /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-1-amd64 ./linux mkdir initrd cd initrd zcat ../orig/initrd.gz | cpio -i --no-absolute-filenames cp -af /lib/modules/3.2.0-1-amd64/ lib/modules/ cp -af /lib/firmware/ lib/ find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -c > ../initrd.gz this gives me a 43MB initrd.gz rather than 6.5MB, but that's not surprising - all the modules in the stock linux-image-3.2.0-1-amd64 package are there, plus about 5MB of firmware files from firmware-linux, firmware-linux-free, firmware-linux-nonfree, and firmware-realtek. There's also the original 2.6.32-5 modules (~8MB) which I forgot to delete :). doesn't matter, downloading a 43MB file over the local GB lan doesn't take significantly longer than downloading a 6.5MB file. ganesh:/tftp/di/sid/amd64# ls -lh initrd.gz orig/initrd.gz -rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 43M Feb 11 08:08 initrd.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.5M Jan 18 2011 orig/initrd.gz the install seems to be working fine so far, and has almost completed. it detected the hard disk with no problems. No problems with firmware for the NIC either (it even detected the Atheros wireless NIC and offered that as an option along with the wired Realtek NIC). the installer did complain at one point about not being able to download kernel modules due to version mismatch, but that's not a problem because all the needed modules are already in the initrd. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>