Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2012 22:26 UTC (Thu) by nickbp (subscriber, #63605)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by Tuna-Fish
Parent article: Quotes of the week

I'd actually just figured out the problem just last night when debugging other unrelated issues* from a more recent Xorg update. Turns out Debian/wheezy had refrained from installing a firmware blob which was a prerequisite for hardware acceleration. There was a convenient message stating this in Xorg.*.log, which I'd not thought of checking until debugging the new update's unrelated issues.

After installing 'linux-firmware-nonfree', things were suddenly much speedier -- I could no longer see any subjective difference between radeon vs fglrx where video playback/xbmc were concerned. Not clear why linux-firmware-nonfree wouldn't be installed by default given a system configuration that needs it, but I guess that's more of a political issue.

* Something was causing Xorg to fill /var/log with hundreds of Xorg.*.log's. Wiping xorg.conf fixed whatever it was

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 29, 2012 22:30 UTC (Fri) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

Not clear why linux-firmware-nonfree wouldn't be installed by default given a system configuration that needs it, but I guess that's more of a political issue.

Yes, Debian policy does not allow packages in the main section (Debian proper) to recommend non-free packages. The linux-image packages do try to warn during an upgrade if you're using a driver and don't have the corresponding firmware, though they won't catch all cases. We could maybe try to make the run-time errors more obvious.