Trying to install debian - but my ethernet card isn't supported

Question

I have a motherboard with a Intel® 82574L PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller. Supposedly the e1000e driver will support this as of 2.6.26-18

From debian bug 509199

Support for this network adaptor was added to Lenny in 2.6.26-18.

I'm marking this bug as closed.

Cheers,
        Moritz

My question (and I'm not too sure if it should be here or serverfault), is how can I get an amd64 install CD (preferably netinst) that will be running that version of lenny. I will be using many of these motherboards and would hate to have to hack around loading custom drivers every time I go to install lenny on one.

Updated: I managed to find a backported installer lenny-custom-0302.iso that worked to install for me, however, I would still think it worthwhile to figure out how to create this sort of ISO.

Answer 1

Two approaches:

1. You could do this the quick, hackish way and just replace the kernel image and modules in the ISO. Fairly quick & easy.

2. Debian has documentation how how to build d-i; http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Build and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Modify

Answer 2

well, netinstall will generally grab the latest packages available, but well, you need to have your networking working. I might suggest getting one system working, and using aptoncd to make a second disk of the packages necessary for the system to work (or a private repository), in addition to what's on the lenny installer.

Alternately if these are mostly identical systems, possibly look at imaging the disks, restoring them, and then just editing the settings specific to the system, such has host name