In addition to Evan's answer about the alternate installer, this drivers disk should contain *.udeb
files for the installer to recognise these. These packages can be found on Ubuntu packages: linux
source.
If you have a *.ko
file, copy it to an USB stick.
I missed the JMicron Ethernet driver jme.ko
and found this module in the kernel-image-2.6.38-8-generic
package. This package can be extracted using dpkg-deb -x [name-of-deb-file].deb target_extraction_directory
.
Within the installer, press Ctrl + Alt + F2 followed by Enter to open a shell. USB sticks won't mount themselves, after locating the disk, mount it:
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
Copy the file to the kernel directory:
cp /mnt/jme.ko /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/net/
Update the kernel modules, unmount the USB stick and load the kernel module (and its dependencies if any):
depmod -a
umount /mnt
modprobe jme
If everything went well, you should not get any messages and can go back to the installer menu by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1.
Important: the kernel versions of the installer and module must match. My alternate CD did not contain the JMicron Ethernet driver (jme.ko
). I could not find it in the *-modules-*
files, but it was existent in the linux-image-*
package. For easiness, I copied this module from an other computer, forgetting that Maverick was installed on it, and not Natty. I kept getting the ERROR: File not found
message and after some time I realised that the module came from Maverick with kernel version 2.6.35-28 but Natty runs on 2.6.38-8.