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

[James Cameron]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 02:03:10PM -0800, Alex Perez wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for testing.

> 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)

How will Sugar Labs comply with the licenses of these firmwares?

-- 
James Cameron
https://quozl.linux.org.au/