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How about easier installation?How about easier installation?Posted Apr 8, 2008 8:19 UTC (Tue) by shalem (subscriber, #4062)In reply to: How about easier installation? by gregkh Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report
I'm sorry Greg, but thats simply not true. When manufacturers don't give permission to distribute the firmware there is nothing distro's can do. This is esp. true with certain wireless cards, making some of all the hard (and good) wireless work being done still not result in a situation where things just work. It would be great if you + someone from RedHat (together representing the 2 biggest Linux firms) could try to negotiate redistribution rights for the firmware with these manufacturers.
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How about easier installation? Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:15 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] It's not to bad. For example on my distro broadcom cards typically will have a firmware extraction kit that will download the XP drivers and rip the firmware from them. Mostly automatically. Just because they can't distribute it doesn't mean that they can't make it easy. It would be easier to deal with binary firmware then, say, having a GUI button to download and compile proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers. But ya it would be nice to have a standardized way to distribute stuff like that.
How about easier installation? Posted Apr 8, 2008 15:51 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] It works great if your connection is not wireless :-)
How about easier installation? Posted Apr 9, 2008 7:29 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link] > But ya it would be nice to have a standardized way to distribute stuff like that. How about driver disks, which nearly all hardware companies provide anyway? Perhaps companies that can't be persuaded to help with Linux drivers could at least be persuaded to pack their firmware in a Linux-friendly way alongside the Windows drivers? Alternatively, said firmware extraction in Linux distributions could recognise the driver disks (and even prompt for them if necessary).
How about easier installation? Posted Apr 9, 2008 8:25 UTC (Wed) by cathectic (subscriber, #40543) [Link] Wouldn't help much - most of the drivers that need firmware that can't be distributed (i.e. the reverse engineered drivers, such as b43) rely on a particular version of firmware (otherwise, it leads to a support nightmare, since they can't support every firmware version going - they tried that with bcm43xx). So being able to extract from a random vendor disc of the week is not much use here (and firmware versions required also change as well - e.g. this has happened recently with b43). No, the only real solution is still for the offending vendors to at least allow their firmware to be redistributed, and then let the distributions handle which version of the firmware to ship with the kernel they provide.
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