Almost any network interface card (NIC) supported by the Linux 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. Again, see for complete details. 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 Due to kernel limitations only the onboard network interfaces on DECstations are supported, TurboChannel option network cards currently do not work. 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. As for ISDN, the D-channel protocol for the (old) German 1TR6 is not supported; Spellcaster BRI ISDN boards are also not supported by the &d-i;. Using ISDN during the installation is not supported. The installation system currently does not support retrieving firmware. This means that any network cards that use a driver that requires firmware to be loaded, is not supported by default. If there is no other NIC you can use during the installation, it is still possible to install &debian; 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. Note that the firmware may be packaged separately from the driver and may not be available in the main section of the &debian; archive. If the driver itself is supported, you may also be able to use the NIC during installation by copying the firmware from some medium to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware. Don't forget to also copy the firmware to that location for the installed system before the reboot at the end of the installation. Wireless NICs are in general supported as well, with one big proviso. A lot of wireless adapters require drivers that are either non-free or have not been accepted into the official Linux kernel. These NICs can generally be made to work under &debian;, but are not supported during the installation. If there is no other NIC you can use during the installation, it is still possible to install &debian; using a full CD-ROM or DVD image. Use the same procedure as described above for NICs that require firmware. 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. During the installation the solution 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. The cassini network driver does not work with Sun B100 blade systems.