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How about easier installation?How about easier installation?Posted Apr 9, 2008 7:29 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)In reply to: How about easier installation? by drag Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report
> 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).
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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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