On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 14:51:00 +0100, Geronimo wrote:
(...)
> Now its time, to become more pragmatic, which means, debian should offer
> installation media, that include non-free firmware ... That installation
> media should be marked as non-free, but I think, it is vital to have it.
I'm afraid you'll have to fight with Debian's own Policies:
http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/index.en.html#nonfree
I for one am fine with the Debian policies and am thankful to have such a great free OS. My struggle, and I doubt it is mine alone, is that as a first-time upgrader, the Lenny to Squeeze transition might break a few systems, which I have a limited window of time to fix if something goes wrong. I need to be prepared as much as possible given those circumstances, hence I've been scouring the Release Notes. The biggest concern for me is how, for example ipw2x00 and bcm43xx firmware upgrades will work. According the the Release Notes, it seems that the firmware-linux package may handle it (
http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/i386/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html#nonfree-firmware) but the Debian wiki says to use the /etc/apt/sources.list method (
http://wiki.debian.org/ipw2200#InstallationonEstablishedSystems for ipw2x00 and
http://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx#b43-b43legacy for b43xx). When I try to see what the firmware-linux metapackage contains, the debian webpage returns an error (??) (
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/firmware-linux).
So given that info, on systems that already have "contrib non-free" in /etc/apt/sources.list with the appropriate firmware installed and working, will the "firmware-linux" metapackage load the necessary firmware when following the procedures in the Release Notes? Or will the methods in the Debian Wiki be necessary after upgrading? I apologize if this seems retarded to ask, but not everyone on this list is a Debian Master just yet. I am making backups of all systems with Clonezilla before upgrading, in case anything catastrophic happens.
Thank you for any help.