Ubuntu and the Untied Gateway

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 06:02:18AM +0000, John wrote:

> This is Sounder 8.
> 
> There are my notes captured as I went.
> Insert card, buut.
> Got to GDM without anything unusual happening.
> 
> Logged in as summer, the user who can administer the box.
> 
> Looked around for a config tool.
> "Device Manager?" Hah!
> btw Neither lspci nor device manager know this is a Tekram device,
> OTOH fC 2,90 does.

If you would send the PCI data for the card, and the correct information, we
can add it to the database.

> The kernel driver (prism54) is loaded. I'm beginning to think I need to 
> be a guru to get this
> working.
>
> The guro copied the firmware into place, did the ifconfig eth1 and it 
> got loaded. Added an IP
> address, and then while fiddling with iwlist found it had joined the 
> network.
> Kool.

We may or may not be able to make this Just Work due to the status of the
firmware:

http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/WirelessFirmware

> It went pretty much as I expected. Device Manager looks like a 
> quarter-baked good idea; it seems a logical place to hook in graphical 
> device configuration, but all it does is diisplay stuff. What a dud.

It's actually a window into a framework that is being developed to enable
some very useful desktop functionality.  It may not be what you expected,
but neither is it a dud.

> I do see a problem though, and I think it a serious one. Hotplug on U 
> (and FC 2.90) is not LSB-compliant.
> 
> Why?
> Everything needed to boot has to be in the root fs (or /boot).
>
> It is possible and legitimate to mount /usr ro via NFS so as to share it 
> with other systems. This, of course, is difficult if we need 
> /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware in order to get the network up.

I'm not sure that it violates LSB, because it doesn't seem to specifically
address the network requirement for /usr.  That said, it's not too difficult
to imagine a scenario where this could present a problem, and it's not a big
deal to move the firmware to /lib/firmware (hotplug already looks there), so
we should probably do it.  Please file a bug about this so that it isn't
forgotten.

-- 
 - mdz