Re: Making Debian available
On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 6:27 PM Marc Haber wrote:
> Imagine the catastrophal message we're sending by "here is our
> official image, but that one is unlikely to work on your laptop,
> better use this here."
As this thread shows the current situation wrt hardware and software
freedom is pretty catastrophic, I think we owe it to our users to not
keep them in the dark about these issues.
Probably a better way to do this is a set of "Debian Installer
Launcher" apps in the various app stores that can detect your
hardware, check if it needs the non-free ISO, copy any needed
non-redistributable non-free drivers[1]/firmware from the original OS,
warn about all the non-freeness found and the consequences of that
while not offering any solution to that*, but offering to use only
free software if the non-free parts are for hardware the user does not
plan to use, detect what software you have already installed and the
free alternatives in Debian and then download/verify/launch the
appropriate Debian installer CD image with the appropriate preseeding,
possibly via virtual machine interfaces so that you can do the install
whilst continuing to browse the web and research better hardware
options and the reasons for preferring free software.
* because lets face it, there is no-one attempting to reverse engineer
and replace non-free WiFi firmware any more, although there used[2] to
be at least Prism54 and OpenFWWF working on that, neither of which are
in Debian though and probably they and carl9170fw/ath9k_htc.fw aren't
useful to have in Debian either since they are for very old WiFi chips
and standards. AFAIK the only firmware reverse engineering going on is
nouveau with nvidia GPUs and I believe they are now blocked by nvidia
signing their blobs. Even Intel's Open Sound Firmware project doesn't
allow software freedom on most devices as OEMs require Intel
signatures.
1. ala ndiswrapper
2. https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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