Finding firmware (and SHA sums etc), was Re: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Arch Linux recognize my Acer Aspire S wifi, debian does not

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

(Posted to debian-www as well.)

On Wed 15 Mar 2017 at 12:21:14 (-0500), Nicholas Geovanis wrote:
> Is it just me, or are the "unofficial" images hard to get to? For example
> the FAQ says "Sometimes, someone is kind enough to create unofficial
> non-free CDs. If you cannot find any links on this website, you can try
> asking on the debian-cd mailing list." Yet there is no link there to the
> unofficial pages. Yes Google finds them....

You are not alone. The problem as I see it is that it's easy to find
this page:

https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

on which three options are given. When you click on an architecture,
the 2nd and 3rd options take you to directory pages. However, the
(most popular?) first option has ISO links¹ which you certainly don't
want to click on if you're playing by the rules.

If you copy the ISO link (right click it) into a browser's address bar
and rubout the ISO name itself, you'll get to (for i386):

http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/

This difficult-to-find page will not only satisfy those searching for
SHA sums, but it also has a paragraph headed:

Non-free Firmware

which gives you a link to firmware-inclusive versions, daily/weekly
builds etc etc.

¹ Bad design IMO. They ought to take you to
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/<architecture>/iso-cd/
This page has links which make it obvious what they're pointing to—
huge files!

Cheers,
David.