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

Thierry Vignaud thierry.vignaud at gmail.com
Wed May 30 10:38:02 CEST 2012


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.

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 you


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