And no, I meant Raptor's "blackbird" POWER system that was for sale in Black Friday. It's like the TALOS 2 (lite), but in micro-ATX format with just two RAM slots and just one CPU socket, but apart from that still a real POWER machine. It's really a small board and not only targeted at servers.

The only real hope is in other architectures than x86, however ARM also tends to have the proprietary firmware problem in the implementation (e.g. Raspberry Pi) and you will still never get away from proprietary firmware in GPU's and other devices.

If you mean Raptor's "Talos II" POWER9 based systems?  I have to admit, they look good, however there is no powerpc64 arch port for my OS of choice (OpenBSD) and they are very expensive and targeted mainly at servers.  As I understand it, a desktop user wanting to run the X server, would be restricted to the vesa driver?

Regarding the firmware in other chips: Well these chips should have limited control and usually be controlled by the CPU (provided you have proper IOMMU isolation and limit DMA access). Thus, the last thing you want is proprietary firmware running as root in kernel space on the main CPU - not mentioning any chip that has control over the CPU (like the mentioned auxilliary chips such as BMC controllers or stuff like a management engine that runs on a chip inside the cpu package).

Back to topic: Eventually I will find some time around new year to look into the installer issue, but if anyone has the time to resolve it earlier I would appreciate it.

Eg if you are involved in a product liability lawsuit make sure your side's lawyers ask for full source code during the discovery phase. That makes life harder for whoever owns proprietary code (it's usually easy to find a few silly bugs in any sizeable amount of source code which makes them look bad in court).

Chris

Some older x86 hardware that does not require running non-free firmware on the main cpu (in kernel space) is listed on the Libreboot page:

https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/#li … d-hardware

There is also other hardware such as the APU boards from PCEngines that ships with coreboot preinstalled (the older dual-core generation uses a cpu that did not have AMD's PSP built-in). Of course, there is other firmware that runs on auxillary chips (such as optical drives or NICs) but as far as I understood the discussion here is about non-free software/firmware that runs on the main cpu, not elsewhere.

You mentioned ARM as well. Well, especially on ARM there are many freedom-friendly boards that are great for server usage except that they have a proprietary wifi/bluetooth chip soldered-on. Apart from that fact that many of these chips are crappy anyways and do not work well in hostapd mode, as a user I would expect to be offered a choice.

Btw.: There is enough older x86 hardware that can be operated without any proprietary firmware except for microcode and (isolated) EC controller firmware.

Devuan has decided to ship non-free firmware in the install media. Now if a user needs non-free firmware, they ought have contrib and non-free in their sources.list, otherwise their wifi card (or worse, their CPU) will stop working at the first kernel upgrade, effectively nullifying the potential benefits of having non-free firmware available at all.

It should be possible to not load it at install time already. If a users then realizes that this or that does not work they still have the option to use non-free firmware or to switch to hardware that runs without non-free firmware.

I am aware of the fact that Devuan does not have that many resources, but I am still confused why it was decided not to keep the stuff as it was in Debian (two flavors) instead of changing it - something that sounds to me like more work, not less.

The point is not that we don't know how to ask the user if they want to use non-free software or not  at install time:-) Devuan has decided to ship non-free firmware in the install media. Now if a user needs non-free firmware, they ought have contrib and non-free in their sources.list, otherwise their wifi card (or worse, their CPU) will stop working at the first kernel upgrade, effectively nullifying the potential benefits of having non-free firmware available at all. If we provide non-free firmware, and then ask the user if they want non-free software or not, this will just cause breakage.

We could definitely consider providing a version of netinst without non-free firmware. But please, do not assume any "bad will" on Devuan's side: any new little thing that you dream of requires time and effort to be transformed into reality. Devuan does not have hundreds of developers. If you see anything that "should be absolutely done!", please consider whether you can help with that, and shout out on #devuan-dev.

HND

KatolaZ

- not free: these are redistributable packages but not free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG).
- contrib: is free software compatible with the DFSG, but depends on some packages that are not free.
- main: it is the standard repository of devuan and all the software included here includes free software according with the DFSG.

Thanks for that, I now understand the definitions.  But with that, and with searching other threads, I still have a simple practical question : is the stuff in the "main" repositories included as a subset in the "non-free" repositories, or does the "non-free" repository contain only "non-free" stuff?

Or putting it another way, if I want free and non-free stuff, should I have both "main" and "non-free" repositories in my sources.list or is just "non-free" enough?

Or putting it third way, does the line :-

deb http://gb.deb.devuan.org/merged ascii main non-free contrib

....  refer to three different repositories ("main" "non-free" and "contrib") that are all included by that statement? Or is it refering to a single block of stuff that contains it all, and there is a separate block, invoked by :-

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged ascii          main

.... that contains free stuff and only free stuff?

Sorry, I was not intending to start an ideological discussion here :-S