I suggest that for the next beta we focus on dealing with non-free firmware better in d-i. An increasing number of machines are difficult to install with d-i, or don't have all hardware working fully post-install due to non-free firmware issues.
There are clearly two parts to the problem; non-free firmware that is required for d-i to function at all is a complex problem that we have yet to come to terms with, while non-free firmware that can be supported by d-i installing some debs is a problem that Petter has pretty well already solved in discover, with only d-i integration lacking. Here are some more thoughts on use of discover-pkginstall in d-i.. * Installing a compiler and building non-free modules during the install is something some of us, including me, are currently slightly afraid of, but we'll only know how problimatic it is once it's deployed. And it can always be turned off. * discover might need to install packages from non-free (#464968). Since by default non-free is not selected by d-i, something would need to be done for this to work. One approach would be for apt-setup run discover-pkginstall -l, and check if the configured apt sources have all the listed packages. If not, it can assume non-free and contrib are needed, and ask the questions for those at high priority with the defaults changed to true. * In some cases, the initramfs might need to be rebuilt to include the firmware in it. (Maybe not enough cases to worry about.) * discover-pkginstall should support an option like tasksel's --debconf-apt-progress, so that it can use debconf-apt-progress and interoperate well with pkgsel's progress bar. I think this will be easy to patch into it. Here are some thoughts on nslu2 firmware.. * I hope to add a ixp4xx-microcode package to non-free. * Rather than doing a special build of d-i that includes the firmware, I'm thinking about adding a script to slugimage that takes a nslu2 boot image and inserts the microcode files into it. Then users can easily download d-i and the firmware and put the parts together before sending it to their slug. This would probably work by unpacking the boot image, creating a cpio archive of the firmware files, appending the cpio to the initramfs, and repacking that into a new boot image. -- see shy jo
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