From: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 09:36:37 +0000 (+0000)
Subject: New post.
X-Git-Url: https://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/commitdiff_plain/38c878b549d05a318a56f82515cb3db211332b63

New post.
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diff --git a/blog/data/2013-06-25-isenkram-firmware.txt b/blog/data/2013-06-25-isenkram-firmware.txt
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+Title: Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)
+Tags: english, debian, isenkram
+Date: 2013-06-25 11:50
+
+<p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
+perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
+working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
+needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
+affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
+controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
+including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
+process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
+they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
+debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware 
+info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
+info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
+info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
+info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
+info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
+firmware-ipw2x00
+firmware-ipw2x00
+Preconfiguring packages ...
+Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
+(Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
+Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
+Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
+# 
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
+printed instead:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware 
+info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
+# 
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
+me for time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
+
+<p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
+this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
+finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
+#655507</a>.</p>