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

Wed May 30 11:09:36 CEST 2012

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
+
+