On 30 May 2012 10:38, Thierry Vignaud <thierry.vign...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > > 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) > > 2) this is unlike the live-cd where we've those firmwares (and > the proprietary drivers as well) > > 3) This is unlike other "pure" FOSS distro such as Fedora > which includes the firmwares. > > 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. > > 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)
See https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3466 Likewise, fedora package AMD/Intel microcode for their CPUs whereas we put them in non-free, which makes microcode_ctl to not work by default See https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4327