Ubuntu 12.10 To Further Binary Blob Handling

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 12.10 To Further Binary Blob Handling

While things are coming to a close in Oakland at the last day of UDS-Q, there was an interesting session that concerns the future of third-party driver installation on Ubuntu 12.10 and future releases...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEwMTY

[allquixotic]

Wow, Linuxant is still around?

Wow, people still use dial-up modems?

Wow, people still use Linuxant to use dial-up modems?

Yeesh.

[soupbowl]

Yeah shocking! Imagine places that don't even have clean running water not having broadband internet. Shame on them.

[schmidtbag]

Yeah shocking! Imagine places that don't even have clean running water not having broadband internet. Shame on them.

yup tell me about it, my dad is in tanzania right now (for the peace corps) and he's living in a ridiculously povershed village where entire schools have no internet connection. my dad has internet, but its through a cell phone using an african mobile service (which is pretty much the only way anybody down there can get any internet) and the phone loses connection every other minute.


anyways back to the topic, i'm just wondering but how much of canonical's development actually makes it back to other distros? including this, or things like the ARM improvements? i'd like to use some of these, but i don't want to install ubuntu.

[curaga]

anyways back to the topic, i'm just wondering but how much of canonical's development actually makes it back to other distros? including this, or things like the ARM improvements? i'd like to use some of these, but i don't want to install ubuntu.

Their ARM work is mostly through Linaro, which works upstream.

[Kano]

Basically it is possible to detect switched gfx cards even on a hd install and configure binary drivers on the fly. Thats possible with debian wheezy and should work with ubuntu as well. it is a bit tricky to show that on Linuxtag as i dont want to transport a desktop system but expect a Kanotix release with that feature or just the package needed in that timeframe. I dont get why U does not preinstall the drivers and just switch em...

[Hirager]

Basically it is possible to detect switched gfx cards even on a hd install and configure binary drivers on the fly. Thats possible with debian wheezy and should work with ubuntu as well. it is a bit tricky to show that on Linuxtag as i dont want to transport a desktop system but expect a Kanotix release with that feature or just the package needed in that timeframe. I dont get why U does not preinstall the drivers and just switch em...

If nothing else, their size has a big influence on this situation.

[Kano]

Absolutely not. It does not matter if you need 100-150 mb more or not. thats a piece of cake today. Also inactive drivers only need space, they are NOT loaded.

[Hirager]

Absolutely not. It does not matter if you need 100-150 mb more or not. thats a piece of cake today. Also inactive drivers only need space, they are NOT loaded.

Remember Canonical's paranoid policy of rolling as small ISOs as possible.

[ariendj]

Basically it is possible to detect switched gfx cards even on a hd install and configure binary drivers on the fly. Thats possible with debian wheezy and should work with ubuntu as well. it is a bit tricky to show that on Linuxtag as i dont want to transport a desktop system but expect a Kanotix release with that feature or just the package needed in that timeframe. I dont get why U does not preinstall the drivers and just switch em...

That's good news, didn't know about that yet. Is there any more information available on this or should I wait until after LinuxTag?

Remember Canonical's paranoid policy of rolling as small ISOs as possible.

Yeah I never fully understood that policy either. I can understand that some people prefer a small download but they could just use Netinstall.

I always end up downloading a lot of extra packages after the install so at one point I just started to use Remastersys to make a DVD ISO with all the software I would need to download anyway after installing.

From the article:

Among the mentioned hardware was for now bundling scanner firmware, support for ndiswrapper (what allows using Windows networking drivers on Linux), Brother Printer drivers, LinuxAnt dial-up model drivers, and more.

I recently installed a new laser printer/scanner/fax from Brother for a friend. While Brother do offer good GPL'd driver support I did have to install from their site with dpkg. I would really like to be able to grab Brother drivers with a preinstalled utility. The same goes for firmware in general and the mentioned VirtualBox guest drivers.