Ny oppføring om d-i.

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+Title: More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
+Tags: english, debian, debian edu
+Date: 2010-05-22 21:30
+
+<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>