[Mageia-dev] [RFC] radeon firmware in non-free

[Thomas Backlund]

30.05.2012 11:38, Thierry Vignaud skrev:
> Hi
>
> I think we must discuss the following point for next release:
> currently radeon firmwares are in non-free.
>
> However this break havoc quite a lot of install b/c by default
> non-free is not enabled.
>

So its an installer issue.


> 1) This makes the Mageia experience horrible on some machines
>      (black screen, machines unusable by newbies (and worse
>      unrecoverable by newbies), ...)
>      Newer ATI/AMD cards cannot work w/o the needed firmware.
>      That's also the issue with several network cards.
>      (which makes network installation impossible by default)


So people should think twice about what hw they want to buy/use.


>
> 2) this is unlike the live-cd where we've those firmwares (and
>      the proprietary drivers as well)
>

This is because you cant install rpms on live media...
(or you can, but as the change is gone with a reboot,
  there is not much point)


> 3) This is unlike other "pure" FOSS distro such as Fedora
>       which includes the firmwares.


Well, that's their choice, not ours...

>
> So there're two kinds of Linux distro:
> - those who provides free&  proprietary drivers
> - those who only provides free drivers, with the needed firmwares
>
> Mageia choose to provides either the first experience (the live cd
> case) or the worst one, the free drivers w/o the needed firmwares.
>
> A lot of thing broke havoc when firmwares get split from kernels.
> According to their licence (or their lack of license), we choose
> to distribute them in:
> - either kernel-firmware, always available and always installed
> - or kernel-firmware-nonfree, unavailable and not installed by default
>
> This make a lot of free drivers stop to work by default (at least with
> the classic installer, it's OK with the livecd)
>
> So we offer the choice between:
> - either be able to choose between working proprietary driver and
>    working free driver
> - or to have non working free driver
> This is _INSANE_.
>
> I think It's time we reconsider this.
>
> Firmwares do not run on the main CPU.
> They're needed for additional chips where no one will ever
> ever write a program for.
>> From the main CPU/memory view point they're data.


But not from our perspective about free-only.

>
> I think we should offer the choice to:
> - either be able to choose between working proprietary driver and
>    working free driver
> - or to have _working_ free driver
>    (that is including the needed firmwares)
>

As pointed out in earlier discussions about this issue...

There is 2 points needing fix.

- the installer should detect the need for nonfree, and ask if people
   want to enable it. (or simply ask if user want to add nonfree media)

- the other thing to fix is to change the installer option about
   "additional CD" to "additional media" and allow for browsing for
   additional rpms on a cd/dvd/disk/usb/... media.


--
Thomas