Translation(s): Nederlands French German
To have a completely DFSG-free install of Debian on the Eee PC, we need support for the various wifi chipsets in different Asus Eee PC models. Although we have not yet reached this goal in any Debian release, recent kernel releases offer hope for Squeeze, and in the meantime, backports may be used with Lenny.
Lenny
To obtain DFSG-free drivers for Lenny for all models, except for the 701SD, you need a kernel backport, acpid 1.0.8-7 or later and eeepc-acpi-scripts 1.1.0-1 or later from Sid. Although ath5k is included in the Lenny 2.6.26 kernel, it does not support the chipset in Atheros b/g Eee models. For these models, Lenny only contains the non-free madwifi driver. As for the DFSG free Ralink b/g/n rt2860 driver in Lenny, it contains non-free firmware, landing it in non-free.
Model 701SD is supported by the free Realtek b/g rtl8187se driver in Lenny, but you need to build the driver from the source package via module-assistant. For this reason, our Lenny custom installer does not support this chipset out of the box. You might want to consider using a kernel backport for this model as well to save you the bother.
Squeeze
Squeeze will greatly improve matters:
- The 2.6.29 and later kernels targeted at Squeeze replace madwifi with the free ath5k driver for Atheros b/g models which now works with all Eee models with this chipset.
- These kernels also include Realtek b/g rtl8187se so it will work out of the box for model 701SD, and ath9k to support the latest models containing an Atheros b/g/n chipset.
- The rt2860 driver is mainlined in the kernel, so it will be dropped from non-free. The bad news is that this driver still requires non-free firmware to work; this is being “resolved” with respect to kernel DFSG compliance (for 2.6.30?) by moving the firmware into firmware-ralink and patching the driver to load the firmware from userspace.
Because of the Ralink problem, for those looking for a completely DFSG-free Atom-based model, you'll want one of the new Atom n280-based models (e.g. 1000HE).