[conspire] Mixing Squeeze / Wheezy

[Tony Godshall]

One habit I've acquired at the first sign of driver trouble is it to
rsync -auv /lib/firmware from my old installation, where the device in
question worked, into my new one, typically excluding any
kernel-version-specific subdirectories.  There are potential legal
violations in terms of doing this for others, but probably not for
yourself (you've already agreed to whatever non-distribution or
non-decompilation or non-reverse engineering terms when you acquired
that non-free blob).

This works for me, but it may eat your children and turn your computer
into a steaming molten mess.  At your own risk.

And it really only works where your dmesg says something like "could
not locate file blah blah blah.fw"

A more surgical approach is of course to copy just the file in
question, particularly if you want to keep your root partition small.

One machine it did not work for was Dell Zino HD Inspiron 410- every
time I upgrade a kernel on one of those, I have to cd
/usr/local/src/iforgetwhat and make and sudo make install. If this is
at all relevant to you, I can look up the chipset et al, but I think
it's just a tangential example to which the details matter only to me.

I'm sure a discussion of the legality and ethics of this approach will follow.

And yes, Paul, do be more specific and less confusing, as Rick directed.


On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):
>
>> A while back, I installed Wheezy in place of Squeeze on older
>> laptop.  A primary motivation was getting new versions of assorted
>> packages, such as GNUCash.  It also lead to learning lots about
>> desktop environments: Gnome, KDE, LXDE which were topics of assorted
>> email threads.
>>
>> Now with things reasonably "stable" using the "testing" release, I
>> noticed a message that was previously ignored.  It advised going to
>> linux wireless and downloading a particular driver so that WiFi would
>> work.  And after following several steps of re-direction, I
>> determined that what I should do was:
>>
>> aptitude install <driver_installer>
>> It didn't work.
>>
>> aptitude search <driver_installer>
>> Didn't find the package.
>>
>> Well the Debian package lists includes the desired package in stable not in testing.
>>
>> I am vaguely aware that there exists a way modify
>> /etc/apt/sources.list to include both, but I can't seem to find the
>> details so that the package manager won't get confused.
>
> You _can_ include both the stable and testing branches in
> /etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -- but that is in
> general a bad thing to do.
>
> The gap between versions of packages in the stable vs. testing branches
> is just too wide, such that mixing the two apt sources can create serious
> problems in your system.  (The same is not true of testing vs. unstable,
> as those are quite close.)  I would even say that attempting to mix
> stable and testing/unstable is way up in the top 10 ways to mess up a
> Debian system.
>
> So, what I'm basically saying is, wrong solution.  You should probably
> stop and consider the larger question of _why_ your fetch of a desired
> package didn't work.  It's difficult to help you with the specifics
> because you didn't name the package.
>
> You might want to look in http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/
> for a specific package version and just fetch it and do 'dpkg -i name'.
> However, again getting back to the key question of why, what happened to
> the package?  Is the driver no longer maintained?  Is it perhaps now in
> a differently named package?  Is it perhaps obsolete because there's a
> better replacement driver?
>
> I'm a bit curious about the notion of a separate 'particular driver' in
> a package outside the kernel package.  That seems odd.  I normally
> expect all network drivers to be furnished as part of the kernel
> package.  In the rare event of (perceive) need to use an out-of-tree
> driver, you as user either must patch kernel source and compile a custom
> kernel _or_ will be attempting to use someone's precompiled driver
> binary object that may work with only a narrow range of kernel versions.
>
> Also, I'm very unclear on what 'going to Linux wireless and downloading
> a particular driver' means.  What does 'going to Linux wireless' mean?
>
> As an aside, sometimes users speak of getting wireless 'drivers' in
> confusion when the intended reference is to a necessary firmware image
> ('BLOB' = binary large object).  Firmware images are not drivers; they
> are files of binary code that gets bulk-loaded into the RAM space used
> by a driver in order to initialise the hardware.
>
> I hope that helps.  If not, I can probably be more of use if you are a
> bit more specific.
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Best Regards.
This is unedited.