[Assist] wireless drivers

Isaac David Reyes González isacdaavid at gmail.com
Mon Dec 29 08:34:26 GMT 2014


On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 9:58 AM, Rill <starbasecafe at gmail.com> wrote:

> The iwl3945 wifi driver is in the kernel, but it seems to be classified
> non-free. So what to do? I can't enable it myself. I'm told it is non-free
> and that's the end of the matter.
>

as far as my knowledge goes, if the driver is non-free then it shouldn't
even exist in Linux-libre. If the chip requires the kernel to load nonfree
firmware on it then the whole card is useless under Linux-libre, even if
the driver is free.

This seems odd to me. Doesn't freedom suggest I get to choose exceptions or
> to use my laptop away from  a wired internet connection?
> Tia.
> Rill
>
>
Free software won't (it actually cannot in a practical fashion, by
definition) tie your hands on what you want to install. You can always make
the exception and lose the freedom; you have the source code and the rights
to modify it as you see fit, but that's too extreme of a method in this
case because I know from experience what it takes to make Linux-libre load
a blob. This doesn't mean, however, that free software like Linux-libre
should make installing proprietary stuff explicitly easy. In fact,
recommending proprietary software is one of the reasons why seemingly free
packages are not free, as is shipping proprietary parts/files/modules
obviously. That's why Linux has to be debblobed to make Linux-libre, and
that's why I don't think the details in your email are true. What you
probably saw was (<-- a palindrome :O) a dmesg output informing you that
the kernel identified your hardware but has no software to use because it
was explicitly taken away.

Should this still sound odd, read
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html


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