On 8/23/22 10:53, Simon Josefsson wrote:
"Andrew M.A. Cater" <amaca...@einval.com> writes:
In practice, the free installer is useless on its own.
That is not my experience -- I'm using Debian through its installer on a
number of laptops, desktops and servers, and for my purposes it works
fine and in general I have not needed to enable non-free/contrib for
hardware support. You may have other purposes for which it does not
work, but that doesn't make it useless for everyone, and there are
alternatives available to solve your use-case (unofficial non-free
installer) that doesn't entail the cost of abandoning the free software
ideals of the Debian project.
/Simon
My recent experience with servers (10 and 25 Gbits/s dual port SFP+) is
that you need firmware for network cards when running with:
- Broadcom (bnx2 / bnx2x)
- Qlogic
- Intel (they partially work without the firmware-misc-nonfree package
though)
No additional package is needed for Mellanox cards. We very much prefer
this brand (also for non-firmware related issues). However, we had
troubles buying them this year (it went out of stock everywhere), and
had to get QLogic and Intel (avoiding the horribly crashing Broadcom
boards at all costs).
Also, from the security point of view, and when running VMs on a public
cloud, it's not reasonable to avoid updating the microcode for CPUs.
Note: we don't use d-i for setting-up servers.
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
