Missing firmware file when installing Debian Squeeze on my laptop

[Omer Zak]

I am now in midst of clean install of Debian Squeeze on my old laptop,
from a netinst CD.

Since the laptop has a Broadcom network card, before installing the base
system, the Debian Squeeze installer says that it needs the
tigon/tg3_tso5.bin firmware.
The installer offers to load it from a removable storage device and I
have a DiskOnKey which can be used for this purpose.

Questions:
1. Where to obtain the file
2. And in which format?

The URL http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/i386/ch06s04.html.en
contains the needed information.
I downloaded (using my desktop PC) the zip file firmware.zip from
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/firmware/squeeze/current/
and according to dpkg -I, the package
firmware-linux-nonfree_0.25_all.deb, contained in the ZIP file, contains
the needed file.

This answers the first question - where to obtain the missing firmware
file.

Copying firmware-linux-nonfree_0.25_all.deb to the root directory of a
DiskOnKey and inserting the DiskOnKey into one of the USB ports in the
laptop, when requested by the installer, solved the problem.

This answers the second question - in which format to present the
missing firmware file to the installer.

--- Omer


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