[Live-demo] WLAN and build platform

[Hamish]

Hi,


1)
it occurs to me that many of the people at the conference will be
bringing their own laptops and trying out the live dvd during the
proceedings. (I've got no idea but) I assume that the conference
organizers will make available free wireless internet for the duration.
It seems a bit silly to force folks to reboot into another OS or switch
VMs just to do things like check their email or do a web search, but alas
wireless drivers on Linux are still at the mercy of the hardware vendors
and often some non-free packages are required to get that working.

I propose we include the non-free packages needed to get wireless
networking functional on as many popular 802.11 devices as needed,
rather than ask the users to figure out how to bootstrap themselves
somehow.

I've got no idea how it works on Ubuntu 9.04, maybe it is easier, but 
for example on Debian/stable I have to fetch the firmware-ralink package
from the non-free repository to get my rt73-common.deb based D-Link
adaptor to work. Which isn't so easy when you don't have access to
download it.

lenny$ apt-cache search firmware | grep wireless

acx100-source - ACX100/ACX111 wireless network drivers source
atmel-firmware - Firmware for Atmel at76c50x wireless networking chips.
firmware-ralink - Binary firmware for Ralink RT2561, RT2571, RT2661 and RT2671 wireless cards
libertas-firmware - Firmware for Marvell's 8388 (libertas) wireless chips
zd1211-firmware - Firmware images for the zd1211 and zd1211rw wireless drivers

& I've got no idea what else.

comments??



2)
For the build scripts I wonder if we can expect the install to be
run on a 32bit i686? For tarballs' ./configure step, and for rolling-
our-own .deb packages, part of the build cycle is to determine the
platform to build it on. If that gets built on e.g. a 64bit machine
there's a good chance that it will fail to run on a user's 32bit
laptop.
???



regards,
Hamish