Lucas Albers wrote:
Brian Nelson said:If it makes you feel any better, the Debian DPL gave a talk at Debconf a couple days ago advocating *not* hastily removing software from Debian in the name of "freedom", at least until we have a better understanding of what "freedom" means to stuff other than your typical computer program. At least, that was my interpretation...Sure, help free software yes. But what if I want to run 2.6.5 with tg3 network card support.
if the driver is available somewhere it is probably fairly easy to make it work with debian kernel. sometime it's not that easy to get the HW working, e.g. when I got the SATA HD I had to spend time on lkml, apply patches (well, use ac kernel with manually applied libata5 patches) etc. lot of fun. and now e.g. extra button on logitech mouse doesn't work (worked fine with 2.4.x but 2.6.x is too smart (more like smart-ass)).
it's getting better over time (e.g. 2.6.5 supports SATA) but sometime you will have to go out of your way: give up functionality or get your hands dirty with out-of-debian software or get different hardware etc.
sometime one thing or another break, even though removing the network driver seems pretty harsh...
erik