Thursday, May 20, 2010

Debian Lenny + Thinkpad T410: network adapter issue

Since I chose Debian to be my primary and favorite Linux distribution on my new Lenovo Thinkpad T410, I agreed to myself to spend my time to solve various specific issues related to it.

So the first issue I met was that the Debian Lenny installation system didn't manage to find my Thinkpad's Intel 1000 ethernet adapter. Google 'said' that appropriate driver for the adapter was 'e1000e'. Manual 'e1000e' module loading (through 'modprobe' on another virtual console) didn't help: seems the driver is slight outdated and doesn't support newer Intel's network adapter.

The solution is simple: to use an alternative disk image made by Kenshi Muto to install Debian Lenny. This ISO can be downloaded from http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/.
Thankfully to the latest version of kernel, Debian installation system will detect Thinkpad's network adapter and the user will be able to continue installation from Internet not from CD/DVD only.

Or there is an alternative way: to compile the latest version of Intel's driver and load it from USB-stick during the installation.

5 comments:

  1. All the images on that link are either amd64 or i386. Were you content installing i386 on a 64-bit machine or did you find something I'm not seeing...?

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  2. Well, you're rockin 32-bit then, which is fine, but I'm still a moron...

    Didn't realize that amd64 is the same as x86-64 on Debian...so I'll try those ISOs out after all. Thanks for the tip!!

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  3. Is kmuto's version the full install?

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  4. @Evan: kmuto's version is a minimal set of software. Hence you can w/o problems install software you need later.

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