Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

HEADLINE: Better support for non-free firmware during installation

DESCRIPTION: Long-time Debian user here and free software supporter. One aspect where I don't have any practical choice for free software is my non-free iwlwifi firmware.

It's a huge PITA to install Debian like that when you don't have the fallback of a wired network. You provide "non-free" firmware packages, but these don't have the actual firmware! Rather they're dummy *.deb packages that expect to be able to download the firmware from the installer, which is of course a chicken & egg problem for WiFi firmware.

I end up having to "apt install" the relevant package on another Debian system, copy the firmware from /lib manually, copy it to a USB drive, then manually copy it over in the installer.

I understand that the Debian project doesn't want to distribute non-free firmware by default, but it would be great to be able to run a supported official shellscript to create an ISO image that's like the Stretch installer but with selected non-free firmware available on the image.

DISTRIBUTION: Stable on my server, testing on my laptop.

Debian already provides images with non-free firmware: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...

I use these when installing on laptops.

These don't work for WiFi drivers as I pointed out because they're not actually the firmware, they're packages to download the firmware. That obviously doesn't work if you don't have a network connection.

No, those do contain the firmware. https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/kernel/firmware-nonfree.git

I see that I mixed up two of my laptops in my example. You're right, but my general feature request still stands.

Yes the iwlwifi firmware in particular is shipped on the nonfree firmware CD image. But the firmware my other laptop isn't. With the stretch rc5 non-free image mounted:

    $ dpkg -c firmware/firmware-iwlwifi_20161130-3_all.deb|grep -c ucode
    46

But instead of providing the b43 firmware there's only a network installer to fetch it:

    $ ls firmware/*b43*
    firmware/firmware-b43-installer_019-3_all.deb
    firmware/firmware-b43legacy-installer_019-3_all.deb

Looking over the packages more closely now it seems only the b43 package[1] uses this approach (although there might be more firmware that's not included at all).

1. https://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx#b43_and_b43legacy

Blame Broadcom for that; the b43 firmware may not legally be redistributed, so the only legal option is the fwcutter.

Hence my suggestion that the Debian project distribute a script that I can run to get the firmware myself & trivially build my own install CD, and that this be prominently advertised on debian.org.

The Debian project already ships that sort of script in the current non-free firmware CD, so clearly it's not a legal issue. What it doesn't ship is the ability to run that on another machine as part of preparing an ISO to install on a fresh machine that needs the proprietary firmware.

I upvoted this even though I am of two minds regarding this issue.

Missing wifi support is my number 1 reason why I don't use Debian on the Desktop. On the other hand, I don't like non-free software and like the concept of Debian to not include it.

An alternative could be to put more effort into supporting all wifi hardware by writng free drivers for it. I will post that as my Feature Request.

The drivers are free and already in the kernel. I'm talking about firmware support.

You can still use Debian on the desktop, it has all the WiFi support e.g. Ubuntu has. It's just the installer that doesn't have parity since it's 100% free, working around it is a bit of a hassle as I described, but a one-time pain.

What does "firmware support" mean? Is it not about installing software?

Drivers are software that runs in the kernel to interface with hardware.

Firmware is software that runs on the actual hardware itself, in this case it runs on the microprocessor on the WiFi card

firmware support involves supplying the binary blobs that the driver needs to upload to certain peripherals like intel wireless cards.

personally i would like to see non-free software kept out of the main disc images but the images including firmware being more visibly advertised and it made clear on the download pages what hardware requires it and who needs it.

So the firmware for a certain WiFi card is the same, no matter if you use Linux or Windows of MacOS? And it is provided by the manufacturer of the Hardware?

And some WiFi cards works out of the box with Debian? Is that because the manufacturers of those cards provided the source of their firmware or because open source alternatives have been written by somebody else?

There are a few models that don't need a firmware blob or where the manufacturer provided source code for it (mostly pre ac Atheros chips).

firmware is specific to chipset and are binary blobs supplied by the manufacturer. ath9k-supported and generally realtek cards don't need firmware; theo de raadt noticed the culture difference between american vendors like intel and broadcom who leave the functionality to the firmware so they can be first to market, and chinese vendors like realtek who take their time to best fit customer needs

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