On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 06:17:23PM -0500, pa...@quillandmouse.com wrote: > On Thu, 24 Nov 2022 16:05:31 -0500 > Jeremy Hendricks <jwh1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I have no idea what you mean. It’s open source and you can analyze > > the code line by line. > > Does that include the blobs we're forced to run to make Nvidia cards > run really well?
The brave folks at Nouveau [1] do exactly this: they try to reverse- engineer whatever they can get hold of. Did you ever think of supporting them? > I also have to wonder why Ubuntu (a Debian derivative) seems to be > better at working on random hardware than straight Debian. Ever tried > to run straight Debian on a Raspberry Pi? I just wonder how much of > what makes these other distros work is proprietary blobs of code. I > could be wrong; I'm not an OS developer. It is true that Ubuntu imposes on itself less restrictions than Debian. I see this as a fruitful division of labor: Debian's strictness makes it easy to make derivatives (as Ubuntu is one, but also as Devuan), the latte explore places where Debian can't go. Ideas flow back. In Ubuntu's case, Ubuntu provides a financial lifeline for more than one Debian developer. Not bad, if you ask me. Debian runs fine on Raspberry Pi. It does need a blob which runs on Pi's graphic coprocessor (which strangely, also manages the boot process). There are some reverse engineering projects around that, which, of course, have been made easier because the Pi comes with a Debian derivative, Raspbian. Raspi's chip maker, Broadcom, has been slowly pushed into releasing more docs. It's a slow work and requires patience and many people. Cheers [1] https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/ -- t
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
