CentOS 5.2 on a D945GCLF2
Everyone goes green these days and with the new Intel Atom 330 processor, it seems there is a perfect choice for a little home server box that sits in a corner, serves files and music and does all the little chores that keep a home network running.
So I got one of these buggers from Newegg, together with a small case and installed it. Various reviewers stressed that the R8168 chip on the board is not supported out of the box by CentOS 5.2 but there is an open source driver for download from Realtek so that does not matter.
However, this box was not intended to come with a DVD drive. And installing from the net without working network card is not that simple.
Possible solutions
- Get a DVD drive, burn a CentOS 5.2 install image, install from disk. Bring the driver onto the box by using a thumb drive.
- Buy a $10 el cheapo network card (the board has a PCI slot), use it for installing.
- Understand the problem, fix it. Install from the network.
You guessed right. I am a stickler for details, so naturally I chose 3.
The solution is actually pretty easy: Get a driver disk for CentOS 5.2, boot an install media using “linux dd”, insert the driver disk. The Anaconda installer picks up the driver from the driver disk and goodness ensures.
However, after an hour of goggling, it seems that either no one has ever done this successfully before or at least not bragg^Wblogged about it.
The facts are these:
Building a driver disk is one of the best kept secrets in the Linux world. The required toolset is called “ddiskit-0.9.9″ and kept in the depths of the RedHat web site.
And, to put insult to injury to the Linux hacker community: It took a Java weenie such as me about an hour to put a working driver disk together. Which I used to install from the net.
Once, you have the installation going, you will need to reinstall the driver every time you do a kernel upgrade. Luckily, there is a package of scripts called “dkms” available from EPEL and Dag Wieers built a package for the r8168 driver, which I update to the latest version of the driver available. This package automatically updates the driver whenever you install a new kernel.
And, to avoid that elite Linux kernel hackers have to do this all again and again, get it here:
* Linux driver disk for i386 CentOS 5.2 (kernel 2.6.18-92.el5)
* Linux driver ISO image i386 CentOS 5.2 (kernel 2.6.18-92.el5); if you want to use a thumb drive, loopback mount this image and copy all files onto the drive.
* R8168 driver disk kit
* Updated dkms-r8168 package for CentOS 5.2, use with dkms from EPEL (Source).
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