Ethernet working on debian but not on trisquel?

18 respostas [Última entrada]
quantumgravity
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Joined: 04/22/2013

Hello guys,
on my notebook Debian is running at the moment but I want to replace it with trisquel.
I only use the main repositories of debian (wheezy) and didn't install anything additional.
Nevertheless, my ethernet card is working fine on debian but it didn't work on the live cd of trisquel.
How can this be?
Does anyone have some information about it?
Here's my lspci | grep Ethernet:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)

Michał Masłowski

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I am a translator!

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Joined: 05/15/2010

It is supported by the alx driver, recent 3.5 Trisquel kernels should
have it, Debian backports it to 3.2. Upstream has it since 3.10.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

The live CD has version 3.2, so in other words, it should work in Trisquel if you upgrade the kernel to 3.5 (sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-belenos) or 3.11 (sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-saucy).

antiesnob
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Joined: 08/22/2013

He can do it if he has Internet connection.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Right, that's the difficulty. I'm not very familiar with them, but it is possible to download the packages from another computer, transfer them with something like a USB stick, and then install them without an Internet connection. Alternatively, wireless can do the trick if the computer is able to connect wirelessly to something.

antiesnob
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Joined: 08/22/2013

I think it will work on Trisquel pdated installation but not on Live CD as those drivers were not in that version. Download Trisquel 6.0.1 --> http://devel.trisquel.info/makeiso/iso/. Surely, it'll work.

t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

Sadly, those ISOs still have the original 3.2 kernel installed by default even though 3.11 (linux-image-lts-saucy) is out there and should be installed by default with these 6.0.1 ISOs.

http://devel.trisquel.info/makeiso/iso/trisquel-mini_6.0.1_amd64.manifest

t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

I also meant to mention that in order to get the latest LTS stack, you need to run this command according to ubuntu.com:

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-lts-saucy xserver-xorg-lts-saucy libgl1-mesa-glx-lts-saucy

quantumgravity
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Joined: 04/22/2013

Thank you all for your comments. Unfortunately, antiesnob is right. Without the ethernet firmware, I have no possibility to connect to the internet and hence can't use apt for anything.
Downloading the .deb package manually and installing it on the new system seems extremly risky to me, since I expect some dependencies to be missing.
If this happens I have a real problem and my installation was in vain.

lembas
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Joined: 05/13/2010
onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Actually, there's a tool specifically for this kind of job called apt-offline. There's a post about it from Magic Banana here:

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/installing-packages-without-internet-connection#comment-48959

antiesnob
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Joined: 08/22/2013

Great, with this information I made a wiki page. Please, check it and correct it or add something to it :D

https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/installing-packages-without-internet-connection

quantumgravity
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Joined: 04/22/2013

I guessed that apt-offline would somehow grab the desired package with all its dependencies on the system *with* internet so they can get transfered to the offline system, but after reading the wiki page I think I'm wrong?

So I copy apt-offline to the offline system? But if the dependencies for a certain package are not installed, apt-offline can't do anything about it.
Could anyone explain how this works?

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

You have apt-offline on both the offline system and an online system. You generate a key from the offline system, transfer that over to the online system, and then use that with apt-offline on the online system to grab the packages you need. Then you take those packages back to the offline system, and you can install them.

The Debian page goes into more detail.

lembas
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Joined: 05/13/2010

$ apt-cache depends apt-offline
apt-offline
Depends: python2.7
Depends: python
Depends: python
Depends:
python2.7
Depends: apt
Depends: less

Dunno if python or python2.7 are installed by default.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Of course they are! Python is a basic component of GNU/Linux systems these days; all kinds of software is written in Python. The only one in Ubuntu systems I know of is IBus, but I'm sure there are several others; I know that Fedora's installer, Anaconda, is written in Python (or at least very largely in Python), for instance.

lembas
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Joined: 05/13/2010

Heh, looks like you're right. Trying to uninstall python2.7 informs me half of the system would go right along with it.

Thus apt-offline should be a good solution. (probably obvious to many people, now I too am convinced :)

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

You are not wrong: apt-offline grabs everything you need to install whatever you want.

The only package you have to manually download and install (with 'dpkg -i' or with a double-click on the .deb package if GDebi was previously installed) is "apt-offline" itself.

As lembas wrote, it basically only depends on Python2.7. Python2.7 being part of the default system, you probably already have it, i.e., "apt-offline" really is the *only* package you have to manually download and install. 'apt-offline' will take care of the subsequent installs (including their dependencies).

If you feel uncomfortable with the command line, the first package you should install is "apt-offline-gui" (use 'apt-offline': this time, many dependencies, mainly qt4 libraries, probably are absent from your current system!). You can then rely on that graphical interface.

quantumgravity
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Joined: 04/22/2013

Ok, thank you both! I will give it a try.