Re: ALInex - ADSL Modems - Portugal

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 12:49 +0000, Luis Rodrigues wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 00:00 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Iau, 2005-12-29 at 16:24 +0000, Luis Rodrigues wrote:
> > > What we want is to have a dialog that shows several types os modems, the
> > > users chooses the one he has and we write the apropriate scripts, if it
> > > needs a firmware we would ask the user to enter the location of it.
> > 
> > 
> > I can't speak for non-Linux systems but the Linux 2.6 mentality is that
> > the kernel generates a hot-plug message to load the right firmware and
> > the user space hot plug layer loads the firmware file. Correctly set up
> > it should be invisible to the user barring installing firmware if the
> > firmware cannot be distro shipped
> > 
> 
> I know that, my problem is that we can't ship the firmware bundled with
> our distribution. So we were planing to crate an application similar to
> gnome-volume-manager that would ask for the firmware do the user when
> he/she pluged the modem in.
> 
> We just haven't decided if this is the way to go.

I pondered this a few months ago -- we need a small application that
when hardware is inserted (HAL event) can query a set of xml descriptors
and then prompt the user with a libnotify type bubble. Done as a session
service, like g-p-m and g-v-m. I think it's sufficiently different to
g-v-m to constitute a different service.

This is easy to code, and probably could be done in a few days by an
experienced coder -- but the legal stuff gets in the way, like are we
allowed to ship a file with URL's that point to the firmware? --
different distros have different policies (i.e. do we have to display a
non-GPL warning first) 

Problems with users submitting xml files (like HAL does fdi files) might
also be of concern. Plus the different firmware naming between distros
could be a problem.

I would love to help any such project.

Richard.

(gnome-power-manager maintainer)