Almost any network interface card (NIC) supported by the &arch-kernel; kernel should also be supported by the installation system; modular drivers should normally be loaded automatically. This includes most PCI and PCMCIA cards. Many older ISA cards are supported as well. This includes a lot of generic PCI cards (for systems that have PCI) and the following NICs from Sun: Sun LANCE Sun Happy Meal Sun BigMAC Sun QuadEthernet MyriCOM Gigabit Ethernet The list of supported network devices is: Channel to Channel (CTC) and ESCON connection (real or emulated) OSA-2 Token Ring/Ethernet and OSA-Express Fast Ethernet (non-QDIO) OSA-Express in QDIO mode, HiperSockets and Guest-LANs On &arch-title;, most built-in Ethernet devices are supported and modules for additional PCI and USB devices are provided. The major exception is the IXP4xx platform (featuring devices such as the Linksys NSLU2) which needs a proprietary microcode for the operation of its built-in Ethernet device. Unofficial images for Linksys NSLU2 with this proprietary microcode can be obtained from the Slug-Firmware site. ISDN is supported, but not during the installation. Wireless networking is in general supported as well and a growing number of wireless adapters are supported by the official &arch-kernel; kernel, although many of them do require firmware to be loaded. If firmware is needed, the installer will prompt you to load firmware. See for detailed information on how to load firmware during the installation. Wireless NICs that are not supported by the official &arch-kernel; kernel can generally be made to work under &debian-gnu;, but are not supported during the installation. Support for encrypted wireless during installation is currently limited to WEP. If your access point uses stronger encryption, it cannot be used during the installation process. If there is a problem with wireless and there is no other NIC you can use during the installation, it is still possible to install &debian-gnu; using a full CD-ROM or DVD image. Select the option to not configure a network and install using only the packages available from the CD/DVD. You can then install the driver and firmware you need after the installation is completed (after the reboot) and configure your network manually. In some cases the driver you need may not be available as a Debian package. You will then have to look if there is source code available in the internet and compile the driver yourself. How to do this is outside the scope of this manual. If no Linux driver is available, your last resort is to use the ndiswrapper package, which allows you to use a Windows driver. There are a couple of issues with specific network cards that are worth mentioning here. There are various PCI network cards that have the same PCI identification, but are supported by related, but different drivers. Some cards work with the tulip driver, others with the dfme driver. Because they have the same identification, the kernel cannot distinguish between them and it is not certain which driver will be loaded. If this happens to be the wrong one, the NIC may not work, or work badly. This is a common problem on Netra systems with a Davicom (DEC-Tulip compatible) NIC. In that case the tulip driver is probably the correct one. You can prevent this issue by blacklisting the wrong driver module as described in . An alternative solution during the installation is to switch to a shell and unload the wrong driver module using modprobe -r module (or both, if they are both loaded). After that you can load the correct module using modprobe module. Note that the wrong module may then still be loaded when the system is rebooted. The cassini network driver does not work with Sun B100 blade systems.