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[homepage.git] / blog / archive / 2013 / 06 / 06.rss

diff --git a/blog/archive/2013/06/06.rss b/blog/archive/2013/06/06.rss
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--- a/blog/archive/2013/06/06.rss
+++ b/blog/archive/2013/06/06.rss
@@ -6,6 +6,71 @@
                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
 
        
+       <item>
+               <title>Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</title>
+               <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html</link>        
+               <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html</guid>
+                <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+               <description>&lt;p&gt;It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
+perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
+working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
+needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
+affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
+controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
+&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram&quot;&gt;Isenkram package&lt;/a&gt;
+including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
+process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
+they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
+debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
+# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware 
+info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
+info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
+info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
+info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
+info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
+firmware-ipw2x00
+firmware-ipw2x00
+Preconfiguring packages ...
+Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
+(Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
+Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
+Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
+# 
+&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
+printed instead:&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
+# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware 
+info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
+# 
+&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
+me some time when setting up new machines. :)&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
+kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
+the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
+download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
+the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
+requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
+non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
+&lt;tt&gt;apt-get install&lt;/tt&gt;.  The end result is a slightly better working
+machine.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
+this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
+finally fix &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/655507&quot;&gt;BTS report
+#655507&lt;/a&gt;.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
+firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
+from the nearby Debian mirror.&lt;/p&gt;
+</description>
+       </item>
+       
        <item>
                <title>The value of a good distro wide test suite...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html</link>        
@@ -29,7 +94,7 @@ suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
-working packages to get it working.  And ad the packages changed name
+working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
@@ -415,6 +480,12 @@ developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
 you do not know how to update BTS).&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
+acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
+as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
+leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
+backlight.&lt;/p&gt;
 </description>
        </item>