On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 03:09:09AM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> 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?

All "installer-iso" ISOs since ascii have been equipped with 3 boot
equipments so as to handle all 3 different hardware boot use cases:
legacy bios boot with CDROM/DVD media, legacy bios boot with disk
image media, and UEFI bios boot with disk image media. (UEFI bios boot
with CDROM/DVD boot media doesn't exist as use case).

A target system that is capable of booting either in legacy bios mode
or in UEFI bios mode will be installed in the mode used to boot the
installer. In other words, if, say, the installer is booted in legacy
bios boot mode, then the installation will be set up for being booted
in legacy bios boot mode.

However, at some period of time, the grub installation made it's own
choice to set up UEFI boot on a legacy boot system only ecause it
"saw" the EFI partition of the installer. This is changed now, but it
might possibly kick in for a Daedalus installation. E.g., if the
installer is booted in legacy mode, it will by default set up the
partitions to support that, but then perhaps the grub installation
makes it's own decision from "seeing" one (or more) EFI partitions on
the non-target disks, and basically fail installing. This failure mode
is more confusing than many other possible installation problems.

Ralph.

> 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
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