+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 27th January 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
+This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
+<tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
+search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> 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
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
+provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
+PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
+
+<p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
+network cards working. For this,
+<tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
+provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used
+the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a
+try.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <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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