I want to install Fedora Everything with a minimal base, but there is no “all wifi drivers” package.
I found “Common Networkmanager submodules”, does this include wifi or just the VPNs etc.?
Anaconda often has wifi support while the resulting system may have not.
Fedora netinstall does not ship WiFi drivers to keep the iso image minimal in size. Though not 100% sure if I remember that correctly.
that would make the choice to install a DE incomplete? when installing Fedora Workstation I will have wifi drivers, but not when I install Workstation from netinstall?
Let me find the reference, I think I remember there was a discussion about it and the need to keep the netinstall iso image below 675MB.
Maybe someone else remembers before I get to finding the discussion.
I may be entirely wrong bc iwl firmware seems to be shipped in the netinstall image …
I believe the netinstall image does contain various wifi drivers. I seem to recall that it has the hardware drivers for everything and the reduction in size is gained by the image only containing the packages needed to do an absolute minimal install so the user has the choice of what packages, DE, etc to select before the install begins. All the other packages beyond minimal to be installed must be downloaded during the installation.
Are you talking about the resulting system?
It will have the firmware and network manager installed.
Thats cool!
I edited a “minimal Fedora KDE install guide” yesterday, that came from Fedora 32-ish.
That was extremely complicated, just because there where no wifi drivers included back then.
There seems to be a bit of confusion going on there.
All Fedora installs use the same kernel packages. All normal kernel wifi modules are in kernel-modules or kernel-modules-core, which are always installed by default, and are in all installer environments including the network installer environments.
All the firmware for them is in subpackages of the linux-firmware package. These are also present in the installer environment on all installer images, including the network installers. However, these are the bits that may not be on installed systems, depending on the package set you choose.
The firmware packages are in the comps group called “hardware-support”. Just about every non-minimal environment includes this group - it’s in the Workstation environment, KDE environment, Server environment, every non-blocking desktop environment and so on. It’s even in the “Basic desktop environment” choice. But, if you do a minimal install, it won’t be included, so any wifi adapter that needs firmware (which is most of them, these days) won’t work.
I don’t think any of this has changed since Fedora 32, I think there’s just a bit of confusion in this thread. The guide @boredsquirrel cited is about doing a minimal install of Fedora and then installing KDE on top of it. Because it starts from a minimal install, it doesn’t have the firmware packages installed, that is all that’s actually needed (the instructions are rather too complicated).
Thanks, so the problem is that there is no possibility to add the @“Hardware support” comp group manually.
That is pretty bad, leading to the big troubles described in that guide.
eh, I mean, it’s something that could be added, but…it’s a minimal install, after all.
The problem is that the Desktop groups contain X11 stuff afaik, In that minimal install I only have Wayland which is cool.
There should be the possibility to add that hardware support group under “packages”, just like “networkmanager submodules” or random things like “authoring and publishing” are there
Yes the assumption is that the entire process runs over wifi.
Is there a good way to create such a driver update disk for all hardware?
The issue really just is that the netinstall setup ISO has the drivers but there is no comp group clickable to add the hardware-enablement to the resulting install. This is pretty bad, and I think it would be the obvious solution.
Again, you don’t need a driver disk for the install unless Fedora doesn’t support the adapter at all. The network installer environment itself is not missing anything needed for wifi support. It has just as good wifi support as any other Fedora environment.
And yes, using a kickstart is a way to solve the group issue; just list @core and @hardware-support in the packages section.
So, the X packages are in a group called base-x. Most desktop environments still include this as a mandatory group, but from Fedora 40 onwards, for Workstation it’s now default but optional - you can uncheck it at install time and you won’t get X.org in the install. And for Plasma (again from Fedora 40 onwards), it’s not included at all, as part of Changes/KDE Plasma 6 - Fedora Project Wiki .
this is actually a question & not a reply.
could you point me to a similar minimal install guide using the everything iso as of 2024 but with gnome rather than kde?
this is actually a question & not a reply.
not sure what you mean. But no, currently not, when I made a kickstart file (which seems like the best choice) feel free to clone and adapt. Or just split up the guide and put in a “GNOME” and a “KDE” section.
@adamwill thanks, seems like a kickstart file is best for this job anyways.
So if I understood correctly, not all comp groups are listed in the netinstall, on purpose? I would create a PR at least adding @“Hardware Support” to that list, so a checkbox should be enough to add the userspace wifi drivers (if that is whats missing)
you posted a github link for fedora kde minimal install guide using the fedora everything network installer iso.
am looking for a minimal install guide with a list of required, recommended & optional packages but with gnome as the desktop environment instead of kde.
Okay. So, this guide is flawed due to the netinstaller missing wifi packages.
When it is converted into a kickstart file, you can fork it and create one for GNOME. I would be interested in helping too. I think combining both in a single repo is also a good idea.
Especially rpmfusion will be interesting.
As a reference, use Silverblues packages (they are pretty minimal, but at the same time need to implement everything to avoid tons of layers).
Install all the basics, avoiding XOrg is very interesting (keep XWayland for compatibility), avoid those weak dependencies, and apart from that the packages should not be that different.
Tbh the issue that is solved is the “bloated” KDE install. I.e. a lot of XOrg (this is probably fixed with 40?), tons of native KDE apps preinstalled. The same for GNOME.
Appstores have recommendations, the basic filetypes should be taken care of, apart from that people can choose their software. So I could imagine that those issues could best be solved in the official fedora images too.
But until then, a guide “download netinstall, exit to tty, enter this command and press y” would already help users actively choosing a more minimal install, but at the same time idk, even more dividing into small subsets doesnt make a lot of sense.