Boot issues with DHCP & wireless driver, fsck, "res

[pythoncoder]

I've finally got wireless networking running, with a Netgear MA311 PCI wireless adaptor card. I've put the necessary commands into rc.local so that it's configured and gets an IP address via my DHCP server on bootup.

The only slight problem is that bootup is now rather slow. The card is evidently recognised early in the boot process as eth0, and it attempts to get an IP address from the DHCP server, waiting 60 seconds until it fails. It seems to me that this is happening long before rc.local is run, so it hasn't got an essid or WEP key to work with, so it's bound to fail. It also reports a spurious IRQ, so I suspect the driver isn't even loaded at this point in time.

Is there any way to tell Puppy not to attempt to configure eth0, or at least not to get an IP address at this stage of the boot process?

Two other queries about booting. Firstly, every time I boot I get a message saying that my pup1 file was not cleanly unmounted, and it runs a check. This occurs after a perfectly normal power down (Start-shutdown-power off computer), and I wait for the machine to turn off. Why does this happen?

Finally, something I never noticed until recently. Early in the boot process I get a message "reset done" followed by several lines of "....", then a message "clear reset" followed by more "....". This takes minimal time, so it isn't really a problem but is this normal?

I doubt this makes any difference, but just for completeness I'm booting from a 1GB compact flash card in an IDE adaptor, formatted vfat. It boots FreeDOS and runs the tiny.exe boot loader. I use a 512MB pup1 file in order to run in a ramdisk. Apart from the slow boot the system runs perfectly, and I'm profoundly impressed with Puppy!

Pete