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[Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

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oswaldkelso
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#21 Post by oswaldkelso »

It's like this. Imagine you're swimming in a lovely pool of crystal clear water... The pool may not be so big but it's so clean you can drink from it. Then WTF!
Someone wants to take a dump in the pool. Now we might have a turd in the pool. What choices do we have?

1. Get out the pool swim in another cleaner pool : fsf free distro
2. Try and swim around it. : currently Debian main
3. Remove it to another pool : Debian contrib/nonfree
4. Eat the turd : Might be very tasty, but it will lead to 5
5. Death of Debian

edit:
If one has free hardware and free software "hard to install" does not exist. Spend time and money where it's needed. I've been trying to run both for so long that the question is almost irrelevant. :shock:
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#22 Post by edbarx »

've used Hantek oscilloscopes - their firmware is littered with bugs (starting from little bugs in GUI and ending with broken fourier transform or software bandwith limiter) - better buy FLUKE
FLUKE?! You mean, the exorbitantly priced brand? Well, if one wants to impress the gullible and naive, one can choose to impress.
Openness of driver code has completely nothing to do with "industrial secrets regarding internal hardware functioning"
Openess has a LOT to do with industrial secrets as it is the opposite. Publishing how software should communicate with hardware can easily give insights regarding the hardware's architecture. Manufacturers do NOT want to risk that. Remember, there are very very intelligent people who can easily conclude how a piece of hardware works given enough hints.

Dear respondent, like you and many others who use Linux, I depend entirely on it, but facts remain facts irrespective of denial.
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#23 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

oswaldkelso wrote:If one has free hardware
So I take it you don't have a hard drive on your computer then? Stuxnet demonstrated that the controller firmware is well suited to malware payloads.

Even RAM will have firmware in future: https://www.devever.net/~hl/omi
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#24 Post by oswaldkelso »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:
oswaldkelso wrote:If one has free hardware
So I take it you don't have a hard drive on your computer then? Stuxnet demonstrated that the controller firmware is well suited to malware payloads.

Even RAM will have firmware in future: https://www.devever.net/~hl/omi
Don't talk wet. It strikes me that the first thing to do if you were worried about unaudited code running on your machine would be don't install contrib/non-free and any non-free blobs.

What has someone hacking in to my machine and installing dodgy malware got to do with Debian sticking non-free blobs in the install disk. If GCHQ/The Chinese/ Russians etc want to hack in to my PC or anyone elses I doubt there is anything we could do about it. The whole point of Main/contrib/non-free is about user choice. There are plenty options for people that want non-free if they RTFM. For people that don't care Ubuntu is over there >>--->
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#25 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

edbarx wrote:
've used Hantek oscilloscopes - their firmware is littered with bugs (starting from little bugs in GUI and ending with broken fourier transform or software bandwith limiter) - better buy FLUKE
FLUKE?! You mean, the exorbitantly priced brand? Well, if one wants to impress the gullible and naive, one can choose to impress.
Well, FLUKE is definitely overpriced - I agree (at least +30..40% more than real HW value), but I've never found any software BUG in their equipment.
edbarx wrote:
Openness of driver code has completely nothing to do with "industrial secrets regarding internal hardware functioning"
Openess has a LOT to do with industrial secrets as it is the opposite. Publishing how software should communicate with hardware can easily give insights regarding the hardware's architecture. Manufacturers do NOT want to risk that. Remember, there are very very intelligent people who can easily conclude how a piece of hardware works given enough hints.
I think we have a misunderstanding here:
1. I've just gave an example of AMD GPUs - try to guess how the vertex shaders are implemented in the HW basing only on the description of the corresponding registers ...
2. Having sufficient experience in HW designing, You don't need to read the driver code - in such case It's just sufficient to read the product flyer - and implement the advertised features in your own, most probably better way ;)

Historical notes:
1. The first stable Ethernet card driver for nForce3/4 has been created for Linux - NVIDIA was unable to create stable driver for their own chipset
2. Microshit was unable to write a stable USB3.0 driver for Win7 (system crashes) - probably they have stolen the stable driver from Linux, adjusting the code for WDM (windows driver model) - they are very good at stealing the code and ideas.
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#26 Post by Deb-fan »

Interesting convo. Wondering how difficult it'd be to install Debian with eyes closed. They've even made provisions for visually impaired persons. Short of coming to someone's place and installing it for people, not sure what else the Debian project can be expected to do further.

Not shipping with nonfree has likely always been a founding principle .. I can't help but respect that. :) For those disinclined to make the slightest efforts or demonstrate any bit of technical competence can only say, awwww poor widdle fellas/felettes. Will spend the next 23secs of my life bawling eyes out over their plight n suffering. :P
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#27 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

oswaldkelso wrote:Don't talk wet.
Fair comment. Sorry for the noise.
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#28 Post by vmclark »

This topic is very helpful to me.
Coming from Ubuntu family and Manjaro and others. I installed non-free and soon came to realize I have some missing firmware.

After spending the day looking at this I finally found some answers. There are several issues I encountered. debian installer mentioned non-free about wifi. That was the beginning. Found out I needed wifi along with bluetooth drivers.
$ sudo dmesg -T|grep error
[Fri Mar 5 09:32:26 2021] i915 0000:00:02.0: Direct firmware load for i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin failed with error -2
[Fri Mar 5 09:32:27 2021] EXT4-fs (nvme0n1p4): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro
[Fri Mar 5 09:32:28 2021] r8169 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for rtl_nic/rtl8168g-2.fw failed with error -2
[Fri Mar 5 09:32:28 2021] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for intel/ibt-17-16-1.sfi failed with error -2
that "i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin" error I couldn't get rid of until I issued a update-initramfs. Took me awhile to find that out.
There was something about a "yoyo" error, but now that's gone. I always wondered about the 200-500 megbyte firmware folder that Ubuntu has. I would just try and edit out what I thought was unneeded. I know what version of wifi, bluetooth I had. There's a tone of drivers that I will never need, hence the mega folder.
An Admin over at Manjaro told me not to remove any files from that folder because it will be rebuilt on the next update, and I was foolish for doing so.

Didn't know much about non-free or why the firmware folder was so large until I started reading this topic. Quite the learning experience!
I kept seeing this topic getting a lot of traction but never read it until today. Thanks for asking a question that I didn't know I needed.
Now I'm very glad I accidentally install a non-free debian.

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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#29 Post by edbarx »

What I always found extremely unintuitive, is the disk partitioner. Since, usually, I have other installations on the same disk, I must always opt to use the manual partitioner. But I always end up not being able to continue with the installation except for the last two installations. Previously, I had to resort to using debootstrap to first install a very minimal base system, manually add to it files like /etc/network/interfaces and add a root user and a normal user. Then, after connecting to the internet, if allowed, I would continue installing the rest of the system manually.

The 'unintuitive' step was, that I did not realise I had to press enter before a dialog was displayed allowing me to make changes to various partition options like mount points, file system, label, etc.

I take it, it is my wetware that is to blame: ageing is unrelenting and my wetware is no longer that sharp.
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#30 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

edbarx wrote:What I always found extremely unintuitive, is the disk partitioner (...)
I'm a little bit surprised: I'm always using the console to setup my RAID - perhaps You didn't realize that during installation it's still possible to to switch between TTY's (ctrl-alt-F<2..7>) - and f.e. use the tune2fs to configure the partitions/devices ...
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Re: [Article] Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'?

#31 Post by Deb-fan »

LMAO wetware = brain, ... nice. I was like what the hell is wetware, did they come out with something, should I google ? Then it hit me ... looks like my wetware is getting kinda buggy too. :P

Don't remember why but pretty much from the start took to prepartitioning with something like gparted live or whatever setting up for installs. So not overly sure about the installers partitioner. Can see how it could be confusing though. At least it's got a confirmation dialogue etc.

Also at some point switched to a no more than 3 installs at any given time rule. Which now it's down to one. Debian long since cured me of the distro-hop, may briefly revisit some distro's like Linux Mint occasionally but never for long. Tend to keep a testing partition for the purpose ready to go just in case.

When get to that step of doing an install, designating partitions, think it's definitely a good time to double check and look twice before pressing buttons. Have always done the manually guided thing, thought of the automagic install options makes me uneasy and my teeth sweat. :D
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