Re: Squeeze, firmware and installation

[dann frazier <dannf@debian.org>]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 11:24:27AM -0400, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 04:27:01PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> > I would rather not complicate the CD+DVD building process even more to
> > produce non-free images.  There are so many images that need to be
> > created already.
> 
> > I would like us to provide non-free firmware blobs that may be
> > required during installation in tarballs that can be downloaded or -
> > if this is not possible - be loaded via USB sticks, floppies or
> > cdroms.  The installer would need a possibility to include such
> > firmware blobs and detect hardware again if required to continue the
> > installation process.
> 
> There's a solution that seems obvious to me here, but no one has implemented
> it yet, so I must be missing something; but I'll throw it out as a starting
> point for discussion.
> 
> Why don't we offer tools - either web-based or commandline - that can append
> a prepared firmware blob to an ordinary ISO in order to create an image that
> can be burned as a multisession disk?  If this is technically possible - and
> I believe that it should be - then we don't have to waste mirror space,
> build time, etc. on a second set of non-free images.  We would just have to
> make sure we leave enough extra room on our regular ISOs to allow grafting
> on the firmware at the end, and prepare firmware blobs in an appendable
> format.
> 
> So what am I missing?

More of a hack than what you describe, but I have a shell script to
append firmware for a release to a given piece of media:

 http://dannf.org/bloggf/tech/add-firmware-to.html

(yes, I'm quite behind on -project)

-- 
dann frazier