This particular package seems to break Debian/Openbox functionality in that it causes a complete system freeze when launching a terminal or other application from the openbox right-click menu. It happened on my Intel Core 2 Quad. Without installing firmware-linux, the system runs great.
Previously, I was running an older version of firmware-linux and I only discovered this by doing sudo apt-get upgrade. I then rebuilt the PC from scratch, adding and testing packages one-by-one. It failed on firmware-linux.
Jamie