Haines Brown via Dng said on Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:14:32 -0500


>So far two netinst ISOs on keys and a commerical DevuanLive key. Yes,
>the former two were verified.
>
>No one has answered my question: why do I need to have regulataory.db
>and iwlwifi firmware installed in order to boot when on Ethernet?

Hi Haines,

I think you need to slow down, catch your breath, and take things one
step at a time.

First, take the time to read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html . I've reread this
document at least once a year for the past ten years. This document is
an absolute necessity for anyone who seeks online help, and anyone who
gives online help. Now, in the days of Large Language Models (LLMs),
it's more essential than ever, because in February 2026 most LLMs
aren't smart enough to ask qualifying questions when the user says
something ambiguous: The LLM just guesses at what the user meant.

Use no pronouns. "It", "its", "this", "that" have no business in a
troubleshooting or debugging session. If there are more than one disk,
instead of saying "the disk", say *which* disk, every single time. This
level of precision is a difficult to acquire habit, but it pays huge
dividends and can shorten time to solution by hours, days or weeks,
whether the query is to humans or to an LLM.

I'd recommend you take 5 minutes to read each of these:

* https://www.troubleshooters.com/utp/ninja_presentation.pdf

* https://troubleshooters.com/telsfail.htm

In an earlier post you said the following:

===============================================================
Whats is intereesting is that daedalus ISO on a key is not seen
by BIOS and so cannot be booted, ahtough I's used it many times
before. That suggests to me that I need to remake the netisnt
ISO key.
===============================================================

The preceding isn't surprising at all. I assume by "key" you mean a
thumb drive or its synonym, USB drive (which isn't completely accurate
because a USB interface spinning iron oxide drive is also called a "USB
drive"). The "newer, better technology" called UEFI often requires you
to go into what used to be called "the BIOS" and change stuff around in
order to boot a specific, perfectly bootable thumb drive. It's yet
another variable to screw people up. I suggest studying your "BIOS
setup" to see what alternatives are available, and how to accomplish
booting to various devices.

You mention a "daedalus ISO on a key". Devuaners, can you just place a
DVD ISO as a file on a thumb drive? Do you have to use some sort of
program to make the thumb drive bootable? Is there a way Haines can
make a non-UEFI bootable (old school BIOS, in other words) Daedalus
thumb drive? With Haines using maximum size 2TB boot drive (or 1TB, he
stated both sizes), UEFI isn't necessary, and it sounds like his
motherboard is probably old enough to have "Legacy BIOS Mode". Taking
UEFI out of the picture would simplify things if it can be done.

Just a question Haines: You didn't enable secure boot, did you? If so,
disable secure boot to eliminate one more variable.

One more thing I can tell you Haines. Nvidia video cards sometimes
cause base system problems like hard freezes and spontaneous reboots.
Just such an Nvidia problem stopped me cold for over 48 hours before I
ordered a Radeon video card to replace it, and the problem simply
vanished. I tried all combinations and permutations of the Free
Software Nvidia driver and the proprietary Nvidia driver, asking all
sorts of questions on all sorts of lists, and never got the Nvidia card
to work on that computer, which is the same computer I've used for 5
years and the same computer I'm using right now.

My advice: Slow down, read error messages carefully. State your
questions succinctly, delaying all but the most important. And remember
that Nvidia video cards are known to occasionally produce irreparable
problems with Linux.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com