I have ISA NE2000 which is not autodetected. In 6.0, when a (network) kickstart install failed to find an ethernet card, you were asked to provide the card and was able to give io and irq, and then the kickstart install continued. In 6.1 you are simply kicked (!) out of the kickstart install.
This issue has been forwarded to a developer for further action. We have seen where problems encountered in kickstart cause the whole thing to crash down.
The behavior of network kickstarts is undefined when the ethernet card cannot be found. The kickstart "device" keyword is provided to let your kickstart install probe for additional (ISA) cards.
Sadly, this renders the kickstart magic unusable for me. There remains two problems: a) I have a collection of machines with different configurations, and therefore for me it is a big bonus to be able to have the kickstart file(s) centrally (on a NFS server). But I can't put the device info in that file, because _how_ is a client being installed going to access this info if the ethernet card is not available? b) Even if I resort to having a number of different floppies for the different machines, the "device" keyword does not work correctly. I use 'device ethernet ne --opts "io=0x280, irq=9"'. It does check for an ne ethernet device, but only at 0x300. It doesn't find the card at 0x280. I would therefore suggest: 1) Define the "undefined" behaviour to be: 'if the network detection fails, ask the (poor) user what ethercard to use, and then return to the kickstart install.' This was the behaviour in 6.0, so I am a bit surprised that it changed into something less usable in 6.1 (!). 2) Check the bug in the "device" keyword By the way, you could possibly rewrite the kickstart section in the reference manual so that it really talks about 6.1 (it is currently a direct copy of the 6.0 section, and thus is incorrect in a few places)
The device thing in kickstart is fixed in the latest installer (available in beta). I have added the other issue to a list of features for future releases.