Bug#694777: Wheezy Beta4 installs but X server unusable
On Sat, 1 Dec 2012, Christian PERRIER wrote:
Quoting Brian Potkin (claremont102@gmail.com):
Perhaps the installer could warn the user if her video card is among those
listed in AtiHowTo and the installer doesn't see the firmware supplied
somewhere by the user. Perhaps just a referral to the wiki page ?
Didn't the installer ask for RV610_pfp.bin to be supplied?
Logically, no. Firmware for video cards is none of the installer's
business. Of coure, from the user point of view, all this is related,
but from the logical organisation of packages, it is not. Unless I
missed something somewhere (which is possible), we focus out
firmware-related attention on network cards.
Disagree, somewhat. In my case, I had a vague awareness that sometimes
non-free firmware might be required, but no motivation to investigate
further until my newly installed system booted into a black screen.
The patch which will probably close this bug, detailed in bug 693324,
will eliminate the black screen problem, which is good, but leaves the
video card running in a degraded state, which some users (probably
including myself) might never understand is caused by missing firmware.
Before this firmware was exiled to non-free, I suspect that there was some
trail of dependencies from the driver modules, which would have caused
the installers to install the firmware automatically. Now we have only
general warnings about firmware from dirty sources, and some messages
in the installed system's logs. I probably would never have looked
for these log warnings without a black screen to motivate me.
I understand why the modules are non-free, and why they won't be installed
automatically any more. But firmware for video cards is still the
installer's business, and probably is installed automatically still,
if it is found in the mainline debian depositories, i.e. not non-free.
The installer is indeed the logical place from a user's point of view,
to find out about what software to install on a new system.
I repeat my suggestion at least to mention http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo
if the user has one of those unfortunate cards mentioned there.
This target machine is a newly installed Windows7 computer at my wife's
office; she is a professor in a small scientific department at a small
university; the university's IT department gave their blessing to install
a dual-boot linux setup, with the understanding that they would provide
no support for the linux part. I rarely see her office, and probably will
not sit at this computer very often.
So, please imagine if the workaround bugfix were installed, leaving the
machine running degraded video without its firmware *under linux*, but
running full-featured video under its Windows7 installation.
Imagine I have walked away, thinking "OK, it works" and mostly only visit
the machine via SSH in the future. Imagine my wife and her colleagues
over time seeing that the machine looks much better under Windows than it
does under linux. It seems like bad linux evangelism.
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