Re: APEX and Debian
* Kevin Price <KevinP@web.de> [2006-07-29 00:20]:
> What makes you think the drivers are non-free? Isn't the ethernet
> driver GPL?
Yes, the Ethernet driver itself has always been GPL but it uses an
"access library" which was not open source in the past. This has
recently been changed (to the BSD license) so now someome just needs
to re-write the driver in a way that it can go into the mainline
kernel. Fortuntely, someone is doing just that and has made lots of
progress already.
The other problem is that the driver needs a binary blob, which is not
only non-free but cannot even be distributed in the "non-free" section
of Debian. However, again, we might be lucky because the
firmware/boot loader (RedBoot) of the NSLU2 has Ethernet support so
the blob is in flash (or RAM, after running RedBoot) already. It
looks like the Linux driver might be able to use that.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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