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
