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+Title: Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze
+Tags: english, debian edu
+Date: 2012-01-27 16:00
+
+<p>With non-free hardware, one need non-free firmware.  This is a 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 to make this easier to handle.
+The common use case I run into is laptops with wireless network cards
+needing non-free firmware, but there are other situations too.</p>
+
+<p>First and foremost, we provide ISO images for DVD and CD with all
+firmware packages in Debian included, to ensure debian-installer find
+and can install it during installation.  This take care firmware for
+network devices used by the installer when installing from from local
+media.</p>
+
+<p>Next, one might need other firmware blobs for non-network devices.
+For these we provide a script
+<tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
+search through the dmesg output for requests for extra firmware, look
+up the firmware files in the Contents-ARCH.gz files available in the
+package repository, and install the packages providing the requested
+firmware file(s).  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 with less manual
+labour.</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 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.</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.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation, to
+make the local administrator aware that they are using hardware that
+need non-free files to function.  We do not know if this is acceptable
+to the administrator or not, and thus leave it as their choice to add
+firmware or not.</p>
+
+<p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
+try.</p>