Re: Free Software DVD contains non-free firmware

"Andrew M.A. Cater" <[email protected]> writes:

> On Sun, Aug 27, 2023 at 04:38:58PM -0700, Birzhan Amirov wrote:
...
>> Do you have an `Official` way to de-poison your release, and if so, is it
>> published as a document?
>> 
>
> You can pass various parameters to the installer: you can also uninstall the 
> non-free firmware after installation - a record of what is installed is recorded

Andy seems to have given you something of a politician's answer there,
so I'll try giving a more direct one:

  No, not as far as I know (if by "de-poison" you mean get to the point
  where the resulting image file has no trace of the firmware on it).

However, it is possible to instruct the installer to not take any notice
of the firmware, nor even try to detect if it might be needed:

  https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware#How_to_disable_detection_and_use_of_non-free_firmware

which will provide you with exactly the same experience as would have
been achieved by using media that did not include the firmware in the
first place.

I suppose that we could provide a tool that would be able produce an
image with no non-free data on it (by replacing relevant portions of the
images with NUL characters, say) but the effort required to build and
test such a tool would have to be diverted from other tasks (e.g.
getting the media to work at all, on currently unsupported hardware).

If you feel that such a tool should be written, and have the skills to
contribute to such an effort, then I'm sure the Debian-CD team will be
glad to explain what would be involved.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil

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