Hi,
On Tue 18 Jan 2022 at 07:48, R. Toby Richards wrote:
> Every time that I search for solutions to my wifi drivers, the solution is
> to apt-get install a bunch of drivers. Why does nobody realize that apt'ing
> anything is a non-solution: How can I apt-get install <network drivers> if
> I don't have network drivers? There are DOZENS of responses to questions
> about network drivers that say to apt-get install various packages without
> any thought to the fact that nobody can apt without first having network
> drivers. It's seriously starting to **** me off. I've got computers with
> Broadcom wifi. How the heck am I going to fix that by using networking to
> download the gosh darn drivers to fix the networking that I don't have? Of
> the dozens of "solutions" that I've read about this, NOBODY ever thinks
> about how to fix the network driver without having a network driver.
>
> Do I know how to use sneakernet? Yes. In my young adulthood, email was
> dialing into a BBS that would then dial the next closest free telephone
> call to another BBS, and so forth until your message from California got to
> the East Coast. Days. I remember trucks with huge spools of
> punch-cards that were data for the mainframe.
>
I've been hit several time with this same problem, or variants thereof,
and my solution has always been to have a separate computer with
network access and use sneakernet between the two computers.
I've always wondered how to do it better.
> When I try to use sneakernet to overcome the networking issues then I get
> errors from dpkg that it can't install debs because ldconfig and
> start-stop-daemon aren't available. I haven't bothered searching for the
> debs that provide those things because I cannot use a deb to fix dpkg
> because dpkg doesn't function.
>
dpkg is a dependency of apt (through apt depends on adduser which
depends on
{c,}debconf which depends on dpkg). If you do not fix dpkg, you will
probably not
be able to install anything. To do that you will probably need to boot
on a live
system and install the missing packages (non-trivial task). FYI, the
dependencies
I get for dpkg are:
dpkg
gcc-11-base
libacl1
libbz2-1.0
libc6
libgcc-s1
liblzma5
libpcre2-8-0
libselinux1
tar
zlib1g
> The catch-22's are endless. In my case, I need Broadcom drivers. I can't
> get b43 over the network. I can't use sneakernet for b43 debs because dpkg
> doesn't work (let alone finding all the dependencies and dependencies of
> dependencies and so forth).
>
> Now what?
>
Hope you can solve your problems,
Loïc
