On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 07:42 -0700, malcolm northcott wrote: > Ok, I read the firmware license myself looks like a typical legal team > CYB effort. So that begs the question: Is there any way for the network > setup tool to give a the user some more useful clue as to what is wrong. > The network tool seems like the right place for this, since that is > where most users will first encounter the issue. > It seems like this sort of issue will probably become more common as the > division between software and hardware continues to blur. Is there a > more general mechanism for informing users that they have to agree > company XXXX's license before they can use the hardware from XXXX? > Mal. > > PS. I apparently skirted past this issue on FC3 because I started using > the ipw2200 driver before the modules were included in the FC3 kernel. > This is really a kernel-side issue, specifically in drivers. Drivers currently call request_firmware() and get an error when the firmware is not found. Most drivers these days simply print a message to the console/syslog and give up. Were there a way to notify user-space that there was missing firmware, then we could intelligently inform the user about this issue. David Zeuthen (of HAL fame) knows about this issue and he and I have discussed it before. Its something people are thinking about and planning for, but its probably a 2.6.13 thing at the earliest. At the moment, there's really not much you can do other than screenscraping the logs and string matching driver messages. Dan