[Sugar-devel] Compatibility report on latest Debian-based sugar live build - Xorg fails to load due to missing firmware

[Alex Perez]

James,

I booted up the latest Sugar-live-build image, which I'd downloaded from 
http://people.sugarlabs.org/~quozl/sugar-live-build/ and written to a 
USB stick, and booted it up in an HP-branded terminal from ~2012, which 
works perfectly fine with the latest Fedora SoaS images.

During early boot, the kernel printed a message which stated, 
"drm:radeon_pci_probe [radeon]] *ERROR* radeon kernel modesetting for 
R600 or later requires firmware installed." followed by a line which 
said "See http://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing 
firmware"

Furthermore, Xorg also fails to subsequently initialize in the fallback 
fbdev mode, with Xorg reporting "Cannot run in framebuffer omde. Please 
specify busIDs for all framebuffer devices", resulting in the machine 
sitting at a Linux console forever.

Simply bundling the 'firmware-amd-graphics' package from the 
firmware-nonfree repo when you build the Live image would mean the image 
would work correctly on a vastly larger amount of hardware, out of the box.

I would encourage you to take it one step further, and bundle the 
firmware-linux-nonfree metapackage, which will include firmware for 
things like Marvell wireless cards, Intel wireless cards, Atheros 
wireless cards (both USB and integrated/PCI/PCIe)

Thanks,
Alex Perez