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[homepage.git] / blog / archive / 2012 / 01 / 01.rss

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@@ -308,5 +308,62 @@ men det har vært veldig liten aktivitet der de siste årene.</p>
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+       <item>
+               <title>Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</title>
+               <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</link>        
+               <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</guid>
+                <pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+               <description>&lt;p&gt;With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
+This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
+&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; based
+on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
+firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
+laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
+work, but there are other use cases as well.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
+with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
+included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
+during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
+by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
+example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
+not taken care of by this.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;For non-network devices, we provide the script
+&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware&lt;/tt&gt; which
+search through the &lt;tt&gt;dmesg&lt;/tt&gt; output for drivers requesting extra
+firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
+file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
+the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
+something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
+&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/655507&quot;&gt;#655507&lt;/a&gt;), to allow PXE
+installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
+script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
+firmware packages.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
+because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
+working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
+included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
+initrd with extra firmware, the
+&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware&lt;/tt&gt; script is
+provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
+PXE initrd with firmware packages.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
+network cards working.  For this,
+&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware&lt;/tt&gt; is
+provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
+the same way as the other firmware related tools.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
+do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
+non-free software, and it is their choice.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
+try.&lt;/p&gt;
+</description>
+       </item>
+       

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