X-Git-Url: http://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/blobdiff_plain/993bacdaa45cfe0bc732505c7d95d0ed592daf2a..c7f4475b04a0040356372a6b04e99cc5d54009dd:/blog/archive/2010/05/05.rss

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@@ -362,5 +362,55 @@ ser jeg mye korrespondanse mellom påtrykk og magnetstripe.</p>
 </description>
 	</item>
 	
+	<item>
+		<title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
+		<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>        
+		<guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
+                <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+		<description>
+&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;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
+&quot;external&quot; 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.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
+contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
+</description>
+	</item>
+	
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