On Tuesday, October 5, 2021, 6:43:28 AM EDT, Andrew M.A. Cater
<amaca...@einval.com> wrote:
Hi Luben,
You hae no wifi firmware / video firmware / Ethernet firmware installed.
You've said in other messages in the thread that you don't want to use
contrib or non-free firmware but I do not think you will succeed.
Andy, I don't know if the output I sent is telling you that, but if it
is, it is not true - my wifi video and ethernet have been working fine and
still do. And I had the wifi card replace with one from thinkpenguin that
supports free software. Tho our computer guy had to do some extra tweaking
since the Dell (bios?) wasn't wanting it.
Your Ethernet card may not actually need the Realtek driver but may work
slightly better if itt is available.
Debian puts firmware in non-free because very often we don't have source
code for it. Most often, we can distribute it but cannot modify it. For
one or two packages, the script extracts the firmware from another form.
The firmware is received form people like Intel or Realtek - it's packaged
by Debian developers but it's in non-free (which is separate from Debian)
because of the issues of maintenance. If it was fully free - it would be
in Debian main.
In your case: I would add the contrib and non-free parts to the
/etc/apt/sources.list as suggested.
I do not want to do that - I started using Debian exclusively almost 2
years ago to avoid proprietary OS and software, so I will do my best to
continue with only free software. Until the inconvenience becomes
insurmountable (at which point I might move to a typewriter or a papirus!)
