Am Donnerstag 21 September 2006 23:58 schrieb Amaya: > I guess you were "blessed" with an ugly piece of hardware with freedom > issues in its support. It is going to take some time until it is ready, > probably in a part of our archive that is labeled as non-free, and > maybe, as you own this hardware, you might even be interested in helping > out, if you are not so angry anymore, at least at the later testing > stages. Both distros would benefit from this work, btw.
With every distribution or OS (name any) you get to a point where not everything works with the shipped set of utilities and drivers. After all, the current situation is not worse than it was ten years ago when patching and self-compiling kernels was the only way to go. I still find it questionable to change distribution because they have _that_ package and another doesn't. So what? It's about the same issue like all those non-sense test that compare distribution by looking at the installation process. I agree though that there is no major difference between e.g. the madwifi driver and that utility for the 3945ABG. I wouldn't care though if none of the two are in Debian, even though I own an Atheros card. Sure, installing the firmware for bcm43xx like with the debian package is very easy but doing it without it is a manageable task. It should be no major problem to install that piece of non-free software. It is already there. And if installing something beyond using aptitude or even dpkg is too heavy for a user, he should ask someone who knows. Oh wait, he could learn something but many do not want to learn anything. It must be pre-chewed and reading some short installation instruction is surely no way to go, is it? Changing to another distribution does not change the cause of insufficient knowledge about the system. And the next problem will come. Personally, I like it that Debian tries hard to keep it a place for free software (although sometimes it gets absurd). And if it implies some restrictions or upstream authors that do not want to understand (guess who), well, everything has ups and downs. However, there are times when this POV results in better solutions (loadable instead of driver-embedded firmware is such a case). Let nomads go their way... HS
pgpUVGqxUEyQK.pgp
Description: PGP signature
