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Intel Begins Support for Debian
An anonymous reader writes "An Intel Software Architect announced on the Debian mailing list yesterday that Intel has begun supporting Intel devices on Debian sarge for their extensive reseller channel. This covers the D845, D865 and D915 chipsets and was done to meet customer demand.
They've posted drivers as well as the various distributions supported by the chip maker (Debian, Mandriva, Novell and Red Hat). Looks like the pure open source distributions are finally getting the attention of the big players!"
Your check is pretty outdated -- newer kernels are named linux-image-*, since 2.6.12 or so. This change was done to reduce confusion on k{free,open,net}bsd and hurd systems.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The kernel this binary deb was installed against is 2.6.8/i386, Debian 3.1.
The actual download is pretty silly. You download a tar.gz file. This unzips into a total of 1 file (so why the .tar?). The format? ISO. To mount this, just use `mount -o loop file.iso /mount/point`
Here's a general feel for the unusual install.
From the email:
"All the drivers of course include source and have been released under the GPL. They have also already been submitted upstream ( kernel.org, alsa.org , x.org) and can be downloaded at intel.com/go/linux."
Makeself. It's used in the Loki installer, and thus in lots of commercial software.
Besides that, grandparents point was that a .tar is a non-compressed archive, and the actual compression happens in .gz. Gzip can only compress one file, meaning that if you want to compress multiple files, you'll have to compress a tar archive of those files. But in this case, there is only one file. So they could've (should've?) skipped the tar step and just gzip it.
.tar only archives doesn't compress. Grandparent's point was that they could have just gzed the one file.
Why not fork?
From the manual:
Or from Wikipedia:
Giving gzip multiple files will simply compress each of those files, instead of compressing them together inside a single archive.
The Marvell/Syskonnect yukon2 driver is crap, but it works. The source code is available for free - check out marvell.com. I *promise* you (as someone who works at Intel) that Intel get their drivers direct from Marvell and does not modify them in anyway. All bugs are sent to Marvell, who change and release a new driver.
.deb file. Even though the driver sucks, Marvell's installer for their source driver is fantastic. I install it a dozen times a day. Have a vanilla debian system, run the installer, package the resulting .ko file as a .deb.
If the driver is open source, why is it not in the kernel? Because the kernel developers think it's crap too. So Intel made a binary
This is just a press announcement to gain support of the Debian community. Probably some Intel developer who is doing this at work to gain a bit of visibility in the ranks (just takes a few minutes).
BTW, these drivers are *old*. We use 8.24 in our validation runs, and even that one is a bit dated now!