[conspire] Mixing Squeeze / Wheezy

[Rick Moen]

In which we unravel and correct some confusion.


Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> The driver is:
>   firmware-b43legacy-installer
                ^^^^^^

Er, note the 'legacy' bit in what you state here.  Contrast with:

> 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
                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
...that one.

> Which did not work. No such package.


First (not annoyed at you, mind), I need branch names I recognise
without needing friggin' IMDB.  I honestly cannot remember from moment
to moment which Toy Story character is current Debian stable and which
is Debian testing.  The functional names 'stable' and 'testing' are a
whole lot more useful.  Looking the current value of those up, it seems
that at present:

stable -> squeeze (aka Debian 6.0)
testing -> wheezy (aka Debian 7.0)

If you don't mind, I'll use the functional names rather than the cartoon
characters.  They're a whole lot more significant, anyway.

So, restating, your immediate problem is that you cannot find package
firmware-b43-installer in the Debian-testing branch, though you say you
could in the Debian-stable branch.


About that package:

firmware-b43-installer is not a driver.  Nor is it even (strictly
speaking) a firmware blob, either.  It's an open-source utility whose
purpsoe is to reach out across the Internet to Broadcom's authorised
distribution site (wherever that is) for MS-Windows drivers for the
B43-series network interfaces and fetch them.  Separate utility
b43-fwcutter (in a package of the same name) then extracts the firmware
image from the MS-Windows drivers and writes it to the correct name
under /lib/firmware so that the hardware autorecognition can find and
load it at the time your b43-class hardware is initialised.

firmware-43-installer _does_ exist in testing.  See:
http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/firmware-b43-installer

Maybe like you got turned around and attempted to install
firmware-b43legacy-installer , which I gather is obsolete and isn't any
longer in Debian-testing.


> 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.

If you didn't include the 'contrib' collection in your
/etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* files' apt specs, you
would have had a problem.

The 'contrib' collection is the one with the awkward and opaque name.
That's where they put software that is itself open source but had
proprietary dependencies.  Thus, three collections in total:

main contrib non-free

firmware-43-installer lives in contrib because (duh) it depends on
proprietary MS-Windows network drivers. the ones it fetches.

By the way, Broadcom could make all this trouble go away for the cost of
_postage_.  All they have to do is say 'You may redistribute this b43
firmware file without modification for purposes of making our chips work.'
Then, the firmware image could be added to a .deb in non-free.  But they
don't because they're assholes and hostile to the open source community.