</div>
<div class="padding"></div>
+<div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2010-05-22 21:30
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="body">
+
+<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 installer provided 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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+ </div>
+</div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
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<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
-<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (7)</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (8)</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
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+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (19)</a></li>
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+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (19)</a></li>
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