Nmgluggers, We meet tonight as usual. Hope to see new faces and familiar ones. I plan to bring this hp stream14, working via external mouse. An interesting state of broken input and output devices. Not sure whether hardware or software is at the bottom of thus, but keyboard did have 'water event' in the past. 64 gb emmc working w/Xubuntu, on screen keyboard and lots of mouse clicks. Hope somebody has something we can work on & solve. :-) Thank you, Ted P.
Hello NMLUG, Thanks for the meeting last night. It was great to meet you all in person. Just as an FYI, after last night's wifi issue with the intel wifi on Debian, I decided to look at my leap15 to see if iwlwifi driver comes be default with leap and I found that it does: lakota:~ # modinfo iwlwifi filename: /lib/modules/4.12.14-lp150.12.73- default/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlwifi/iwlwifi.ko license: GPL author: Copyright(c) 2003- 2015 Intel Corporation <linuxwifi@in tel.com> description: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux ... In leap, it would have detected the intel wireless card and automatically loaded the iwlwifi driver/module and worked without having to enable the non-free repo for Debian. I double checked my raspberry pi (which is Debian based) and the wireless driver does not come by default: ls /lib/modules/4.19.57-v7l+/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ ath atmel broadcom intersil mac80211_hwsim.ko marvell mediatek r alink realtek rndis_wlan.ko zydas Which is why it's required to enable the non-free repo. Anyway, just thought I would share this info in case anyone finds it useful. Here's the free downloadable versions of SUSE in case anyone wants to try it out. https://www.opensuse.org/ Tumbleweed is bleeding edge Leap is the version that is released closely to the real Enterprise version of SUSE. Thanks again for making me feel welcomed at the NMLUG meeting.
Hey Leo I'm glad you made it out!
Just as an FYI, after last night's wifi issue with the intel wifi on Debian, I decided to look at my leap15 to see if iwlwifi driver comes be default with leap and I found that it does:
Many distros package and ship these non-free binary blogs that are required to use proprietary hardware. In fact, stock Linux has many binary blobs in it as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre
lakota:~ # modinfo iwlwifi filename: /lib/modules/4.12.14-lp150.12.73- default/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlwifi/iwlwifi.ko license: GPL author: Copyright(c) 2003- 2015 Intel Corporation <linuxwifi@in tel.com> description: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux ...
What you have found is the iwlwifi.ko kernel module and that is free software (gpl). But this module needs the non free firmware to be loaded in order to actually use this hardware.
In leap, it would have detected the intel wireless card and automatically loaded the iwlwifi driver/module and worked without having to enable the non-free repo for Debian.
I double checked my raspberry pi (which is Debian based) and the wireless driver does not come by default: ls /lib/modules/4.19.57-v7l+/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ ath atmel broadcom intersil mac80211_hwsim.ko marvell mediatek r alink realtek rndis_wlan.ko zydas Which is why it's required to enable the non-free repo.
Anyway, just thought I would share this info in case anyone finds it useful.
I know its convenient to have your hardware just work but by including these non-free bits automatically, users have no idea that they are using proprietary hardware and closed source software. If everything just works then users will continue buying non-free hardware and the problem never gets solved. https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/hardware-firmware-drivers I think Debian has a decent approach to this problem. It doesn't ship non-free but does provide a non-free repo to install it. This way you realize that you have an intel wireless card thats not free and you have a chance to install an Atheros card instead, for example. Take a look at this https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html Hope to see you again next meeting! Jason
participants (3)
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jason schaefer -
leopoldo＠maciasnetwork.com -
Ted Pomeroy