blog/data/2012-01-27-skolelinux.txt

   1 Title: Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze
   2 Tags: english, debian edu
   3 Date: 2012-01-27 16:00
   4
   5 <p>With non-free hardware, one need non-free firmware.  This is a sad
   6 fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
   7 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based on
   8 Squeeze, we provide several scripts to make this easier to handle.
   9 The common use case I run into is laptops with wireless network cards
  10 needing non-free firmware, but there are other situations too.</p>
  11
  12 <p>First and foremost, we provide ISO images for DVD and CD with all
  13 firmware packages in Debian included, to ensure debian-installer find
  14 and can install it during installation.  This take care firmware for
  15 network devices used by the installer when installing from from local
  16 media.</p>
  17
  18 <p>Next, one might need other firmware blobs for non-network devices.
  19 For these we provide a script
  20 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
  21 search through the dmesg output for requests for extra firmware, look
  22 up the firmware files in the Contents-ARCH.gz files available in the
  23 package repository, and install the packages providing the requested
  24 firmware file(s).  I have proposed to do something similar in
  25 debian-installer (BTS report
  26 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
  27 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation with less manual
  28 labour.</p>
  29
  30 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
  31 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
  32 working, the initrd some times need extra firmware included to be able
  33 to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation initrd with extra
  34 firmware, the
  35 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
  36 provided.</p>
  37
  38 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
  39 network cards working.  For this,
  40 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
  41 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.</p>
  42
  43 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation, to
  44 make the local administrator aware that they are using hardware that
  45 need non-free files to function.  We do not know if this is acceptable
  46 to the administrator or not, and thus leave it as their choice to add
  47 firmware or not.</p>
  48
  49 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
  50 try.</p>