</description>
</item>
+ <item>
+ <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
+found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
+working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
+definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
+
+<p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
+include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
+get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
+firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
+install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
+are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
+an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
+enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
+debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
+Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
+to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
+/cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
+found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
+going to work.</p>
+
+<p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
+look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
+the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
+packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
+"external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
+/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
+solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
+look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
+provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
+to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
+Edu.</p>
+
+<p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
+activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
+hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
+run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
+license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
+solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
+contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
+The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
+issues are known and should be solved:
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>The wicd package seen to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
+parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
+seem to be on the case.</li>
+
+<li>The nvidia X driver seem to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
+triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
+maintainer is on the case.</li>
+
+<li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
+sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
+sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
+/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
+sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
+workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
+sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
+solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
+some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
+which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
+
+<p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
+the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
+list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
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