blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
  20
  21
  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</div>
  24       <div class="date">27th January 2012</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
  26 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
  27 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
  28 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
  29 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
  30 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
  31 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
  32
  33 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
  34 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
  35 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
  36 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
  37 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
  38 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
  39 not taken care of by this.</p>
  40
  41 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
  42 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
  43 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
  44 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
  45 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
  46 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
  47 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
  48 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
  49 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
  50 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
  51 firmware packages.</p>
  52
  53 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
  54 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
  55 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
  56 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
  57 initrd with extra firmware, the
  58 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
  59 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
  60 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
  61
  62 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
  63 network cards working.  For this,
  64 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
  65 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
  66 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
  67
  68 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
  69 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
  70 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
  71
  72 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
  73 try.</p>
  74 </div>
  75
  76       <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>
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