Catherine Gramze wrote: > >The point of free software is not to cater to your personal >preferences, or mine, but to make that software accessible and useful >to the greatest number of people. The netinst installer doesn't do >that when it allows a very broken installation to result. There will >inevitably be "arbitrary" decisions involved in a project like this, >like not including the non-free firmware in the installer, and the >switch to systemd.
To be honest, I think we have a mostly reasonable setup right now. I've just tested the stretch RC2 netinst in a VM without networking. It did give a prominent warning from the netcfg step: No network interfaces were found. The installation system was unable to find a network device. You may need to load a specific module for your network card, if you have one. For this, go back to the network hardware detection step. *If* you continue the installer past that warning, you will still get prompted about network mirrors (which is not all that clever, admittedly!) before tasksel. You can choose (again, with a warning) to not use a mirror and *then* you'll get the option to just install the base system ("standard"). I don't have ready access right now to a machine *with* network devices, but only those that need firmware. What exact messages do you get there? As a separate point, there are *unofficial* netinst images including the non-free firmware packages, and we've been making those for a while. I'm tempted to add a version of DVD#1 including the firmware too, starting with stretch. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com < liw> everything I know about UK hotels I learned from "Fawlty Towers"