Debian Sarge install with old CD set and a thumb drive

The following is mainly to remind myself how I got my system reinstalled, and for the use of anyone else in a similar situation.

I managed to corrupt either the master boot record or the partition table of the hard drive on my crappy old Winbook (400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM). And I don’t have a permanent, wired internet connection, only a shared wireless connection. So how to get my laptop back?

Luckily, I had some Debian CDs from a couple of years ago, so I was able to reinstall a more-or-less functional Linux system. But ndiswrapper, the module that allows you to use Windows drivers for wireless cards, wasn’t included. Better yet, there isn’t a binary package for the ndiswrapper module. So you have to apt-get ndiswrapper-source and ndiswrapper-utils, then compile the ndiswrapper module. But how to get them without having the wireless access in the first place?

The steps involved turned out to be:

1. Install base system from CDs.
2. apt-get install module-assistant build-essential kernel-headers-`uname -r`
3. apt-get install bsdgames (so I could play mille bornes while waiting for the install to finish)
4. apt-get install x-window-system icewm (latter is a light, fast, intuitive window manager, also see fluxbox)
5. apt-get install dillo mozilla-firefox (two browsers, one minimal, one javascript-enabled)
6. apt-get install wireless-tools
7. download ndiswrapper-source and ndiswrapper utils from internetworked computer, transfer via thumb drive to Winbook
8. dpkg -i ndiswrapper-source*.deb
9. dpkg -i ndiswrapper-utils*.deb These last two packages are interdependent. But I couldn’t install them simultaneously using apt-get, because the packages in the APT database are from the CDs, which didn’t have the ndiswrapper packages.
10. apt-get -f install – forced the two ndiswrapper packages, already unpacked by dpkg, to configure. That could possibly have been problematic, but it seems I was lucky.
11. module-assistant — used the UI to choose the steps to build and install the ndiswrapper module.

After successfully building and installing the module, I installed the driver with

ndiswrapper -i <path to win driver>/mrv8335.inf

then

modprobe ndiswrapper

and the wireless card lit up (only necessary the first time. Module-assistant adds the necessary line to /etc/modules, so the module is automatically loaded at startup).

After that:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "ACCESS POINT"
dhclient wlan0

and I was connected to the internet.

Tags: compile, debian, Linux, module, ndiswrapper, wireless