Installing linux/96/en

The "American English" keyboard corresponds to the QWERTY layout, otherwise pick yours:

Until now the installation steps were completely contained in the boot image included on the CD/DVD, a file of limited size and loaded into memory by the BIOS when booting from the removable medium. What follows are a few automatic windows showing progress in:

• detecting hardware: detects hardware and tries to identify the drive and loads the modules of the various hardware components detected, and then "mounts" the drive to read it
• loading additional components: loads all the files necessary to continue including additional drivers for remaining hardware (especially the network card), as well as all the components of the installation program
• detecting network hardware: tries to identify the network card and load the associated firmware. If automatic detection fails, you can manually select the firmware to load, and you can do it later. If need be you can use a USB-network-adapter. If doing a netinst installation, this must be made to work now, because the debian packages must be loaded from the network.

Next the installer attempts an automatic network configuration by DHCP (for IPv4) and by IPv6 network discovery. If this fails, the installer provides choices: you can try again, attempt DHCP configuration by declaring the name of the machine (rumpelstiltskin jumps to mind), or set up a static network configuration. This requires having an IP address, a subnet mask, an IP address for a potential gateway, a machine name, and a domain name to enter.