Re: Non-free firmware [was: Debian install Question]
[Fixed top-posting.]
On Mon, 01 Mar 2021 10:23:51 +0000
David Goodenough <david.goodenough@btconnect.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 1 March 2021 09:29:57 GMT Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> > On Du, 28 feb 21, 12:03:31, Celejar wrote:
> > > Snark aside, what's wrong with something like this:
> > >
> > > "Many wireless network cards (and even some wired ones) require
> > > non-free firmware to function properly. This firmware is not included
> > > in the standard installation images, due to Debian's free software
> > > ideals. If the network hardware your installation will rely upon
> > > requires such firmware, you may consider using the alternate non-free
> > > installation images available here."
> >
> > For those who didn't visit the Debian website recently, following the
> > discussion on debian-devel this is now two clicks away from the home
> > page (-> More... -> Download: More variants of Debian images):
> >
> > https://www.debian.org/distrib/
> >
> > If any of the hardware in your system requires non-free firmware to
> > be loaded with the device driver, you can use one of the tarballs of
> > common firmware packages or download an unofficial image including
> > these non-free firmwares.
> >
> > Instructions how to use the tarballs and general information about
> > loading firmware during an installation can be found in the
> > Installation Guide.
> >
> > unofficial installation images for "stable" with firmware included
> How is a naive user meant to know whether his hardware required non-free firmware?
> The only route that seems to be given by this wording is that they install (or try to install)
> the system using the official image, and then have to work out for themselves what does
> not work, and from that which unofficial image to use.
>
> Could the installer not help here by identifying hardware it can not support but which an
> unofficial image does support and point the user in the right
> direction? Yes the knowledge of which hardware exists changes over time, and after the
> installer is built, but if the unofficial images had machine readable descriptors on the
> debian web site of what they support (which would be updated each time a new image
> was added) then the installer could consult this and thus be able to give the best available
> advice.
It's even worse than that - as I reported here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895258
in at least some cases, if NIC firmware is missing, the installer will
simply display the rather unhelpful message: "Network configuration
failure," with no hint of what the problem might actually be. A savvy user
will know to look in the logs, where the problem is made quite clear,
but the installer itself could certainly do with some improvement.
Celejar
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