How about easier installation? [LWN.net]

How about easier installation?

Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:15 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: How about easier installation? by shalem
Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report

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.

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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.