[conspire] Mixing Squeeze / Wheezy

[Paul Zander]

The driver is:
  firmware-b43legacy-installer

Described on:
  http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Ubuntu.2FDebian

Which for Ubuntu/Debian says to:
  sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

Which did not work. No such package.

I tried to re-trace my steps through the packages at debian.org and why I thought I had a problem with releases. 

Turns out that all I had to do was put "contrib" in the right place in sources.list.

Now I don't get the error message. Later I will see if it actually works.

Paul





--- On Mon, 4/29/13, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Mixing Squeeze / Wheezy
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Date: Monday, April 29, 2013, 2:07 PM
> 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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