blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
  20
  21
  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</div>
  24       <div class="date">17th October 2014</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
  26 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
  27 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
  28 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
  29 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
  30 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
  31 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
  32
  33 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
  34 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
  35 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
  36 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
  37 of this story.)</p>
  38
  39 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
  40 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
  41 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
  42 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
  43 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
  44 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
  45 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
  46 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
  47 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
  48 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
  49
  50 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
  51 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
  52 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
  53 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
  54
  55 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
  56 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
  57
  58 <p><blockquote><pre>
  59 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
  60 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
  61 </pre></blockquote></p>
  62
  63 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
  64 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
  65 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
  66 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
  67 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
  68 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
  69 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
  70 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
  71
  72 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
  73 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
  74
  75 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
  76 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
  77 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
  78 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
  79 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
  80
  81 <p><blockquote><pre>
  82 Task: isenkram-packages
  83 Section: hardware
  84 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
  85  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
  86  proposed.
  87 Test-new-install: show show
  88 Relevance: 8
  89 Packages: for-current-hardware
  90
  91 Task: isenkram-firmware
  92 Section: hardware
  93 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
  94  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
  95  packages are proposed.
  96 Test-new-install: mark show
  97 Relevance: 8
  98 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
  99 </pre></blockquote></p>
 100
 101 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
 102 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
 103 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
 104 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
 105 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
 106
 107 <p><blockquote><pre>
 108 #!/bin/sh
 109 #
 110 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
 111 export PATH
 112 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
 113 </pre></blockquote></p>
 114
 115 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
 116 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
 117
 118 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
 119 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
 120 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
 121 install.</p>
 122
 123 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
 124 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
 125 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
 126 </div>
 127
 128       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.</div>
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