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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!"
Excellent! This skews the reseller scene somewhat such that others will be required to follow to equalize. In following they will skew it even more against the laggards who will finally capitulate.
Huzzah!
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Open source distros shouldn't need to get the attention of the big players, the big players should make everything to a standard of sorts, so everybody can be 'certified' regardless.
But it's not a perfect world, after all.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Yeah but...Debtel does have quite as good of a ring to it....
$sig$
Your check is pretty outdated -- newer kernels are named linux-image-*, since 2.6.12 or so.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?
Why support distributions when what is needed for that support is either actual drivers (open source), or technical information to allow kernel developers to write the drivers. Instead, this "support" should be specifically targeting "The Linux Kernel". Then supplementary support can be provided to retractively install those drivers in distributions containing older kernel versions that don't include the drivers. Genuine "Linux Support" would mean doing whatever is necessary so that a future kernel version will correctly function with the targeted hardware. Likewise, similar support should also be provided for all the BSDs (even if just supplying the info to let the developers create the necessary code).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
OK, maybe this is not exactly on topic, but why is it that Debian gets no respect on /. If there's an article on /. like "Ubuntu Dapper beta-1.0.652 now available for testing" or "Some guy in Australia evaluates ubuntu on his business desktop", it will get put into MAIN. If there is an article about the new graphic debian installer or Intel now supporting Debian with open source drivers, it only goes into the linux section.
/. posts that say "Hey, if you want to run kernel 1.4 in 2005, try Debian." Hello, try debian unstable. Postgresql 8.1 was in debian unstable 1 day after it was released recently. If you're doing development, a bit of instability is fine (and IMHO, unstable is often more stable than ubuntu's official releases). If you want to run a production server, debian stable is hard to beat.
/.!!!
I am now working as a java developer. In the past I've done development , DBA work, and sysadmin work, and whenever I want to get a server working well (or work on some development), my first option is ALWAYS Debian. Sure, right now I'm stuck working on solaris because I have to work with some commercial, binary-apps that do not run on any linux distros. Maybe I will sometimes consider using centos or something like that if I need to work with software that is only supported for RHEL.
But if I have an option, I use Debian. I have a small group of FOSS-enthusiast developer friends. We sort-of met each other arbitrarily, and we subsequently found that we all use Debian. When my cousin in Poland (I'm in the USA) was trying out different *nix distros, he eventually also settled on Debian (before he found out that I use it too).
Commercial distros appeal to newbies with their graphical installers. Ubuntu appeals to newbies who are charmed by the latest gnome apps. Many developers and sysadmins, on the other hand, who have used various distros have discovered that Debian is incredible for getting work done. It has more packages than any distro (I mean, EVERY FOSS tool is in Debian and it just keeps getting better and better -- now parrot, several FOSS java vm's, mono, Postgresql 8.1, mysql 5... are in unstable). When you want to compile from source, building (and customizing) your own deb from a source deb is VERY easy. And when you don't have time to worry about building from source and want to get some software up and running in a hurry, apt and dpkg are AMAZING.
Show me another distro right now that will let me install postgresql 8.1, parrot, mysql 5, mono, and several different FOSS java tools from binary packages in less than 5 minutes. It pisses me off when I read
OK, gentoo is another great community distro and warrants respect for the hard work and quality that the community puts into it. But for me and many other people who truly love to use FOSS tools on every continent in the world in dozens of countries, whenever we consider trying out another distro for a while, we find that we're better off just using Debian.
Debian deserves more respect on
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!
I was very happy to note Intel released drivers for Linux. I use Linux desktop on Intel 865. I did not want to buy dual-core (Intel 945-based) because no drivers.
_ drive.htm)
....
BUT, I was very surprised and very much disappointed to see notes on Intel website.
(http://developer.intel.com/design/motherbd/cz/cz
For Windows:
Note: The Windows* OS device drivers listed have been evaluated on this Intel® Desktop board.
For Linux:
1. All BETA and Linux* information and software contained herein is provided "AS IS" to Intel customers. Intel Corporation disclaims all express or implied warranties and liabilities for the use of this document, the software...
Why such a discrimination? For Windows, fully tested, for Linux, eat as it is!!!!
Isn't it a shame for manufacturer like Intel to say we released drivers untested??? This is unbelievable and very very iresponsible.
We can forgive a poor open source programmer who develop a driver and say I don't have resources to test for all chipsets but it runs on my computer.
What's the execuse multi-billion dollar Intel has to say? No resources? Cannot afford to allocate at least one programmer to test them?