-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
-contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
+
In the Debian
+popularity-contest numbers, the adobe-flashplugin package the
+second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
+most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
+working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the
+users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
+installed.
+
+
In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
+(«Skolelinux
+i bruk â Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
+stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs»), one of the most important problems
+schools experienced with Debian
+Edu/Skolelinux was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
+web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
+the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
+good reason to stay with Windows.
+
+
I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
+said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
+everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
+comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
+non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
+understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
+example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
+it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
+distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
+pages they want to visit.
+
+
This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
+and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
+distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
+Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
+to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
+the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
+unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
+The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
+release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
+with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
+accept the new package into Squeeze.