I’ll spare you the back story, but in brief installing the USB NIC driver for the beaglebone black is horribly annoying if you’re using a UK keyboard layout.
“The current language is not supported by the Device Driver Installation Wizard.”
Really? The same message from both \Drivers\Windows\BONE_D64.exe and \BONE_DRV.exe
My current system locale is English – so that doesn’t sound right. British English, that is. Crack open either of those binaries (I used 7-zip) and you’ll find dpinst.exe and dpinst.xml.
Investigating the XML file reveals several sets of language tags;
<language code="0x0409">.....</language>
<language code="0x0804"></language>
<language code="0x0401"></language>
...
The the code for British English is missing, and the binary quite unforgivingly handles this situation by refusing to install, rather than picking US English or any other language as a default.
It was easy enough to fix. A quick search and I’ve found a document published by Microsoft titled, “Language Identifier Constants and Strings” which enumerates the language and locale specific identifier codes built into the Windows API, so 0×0809 – the code for United Kingdom (GB). Maybe you can find yours in the list too.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd318693(VS.85).aspx
I added the missing locale identifier to the XML document and moved on to the next obstacle.
<language code=”0×0409″></language>
Next problem: The drivers are unsigned and Windows 8 doesn’t like that.
Windows 8 now entirely rejects unsigned drivers. One work around is quite simple: reboot into the advanced OS boot options menu and temporarily enable the installation of unsigned drivers. Unsigned driver protection is automatically re-enabled on the next reboot.
We can reboot into the advanced boot options menu from a command prompt:
C:\> shutdown -o -r -t 0
The options I’m using are;
-o - Go to the advanced boot options menu and restart the computer.-r - Reboot.-t - Time before shutdown in seconds.Much better, but what an awkward and fiddly process!