staging/wlan-ng firmware blob

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Karl
Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Dear friends
>
> With the advent of 2.6.31 into Karmic, please be advised that the
> staging/wlan-ng driver (module prism2_usb.ko) used for prism2_usb cards
> can now load the card firmware blob direct from /lib/firmware using the
> normal kernel firmware mechanism (previously it required a special
> userspace program to squirt the firmware at it).
>
> The driver will load prism2_ru.hex if present in /lib/firmware.
>
> Therefore can we upgrade the Ubuntu linux-firmware package to include
> this file?

Patches to the linux-firmware should be sent to David Woodhouse. Since
this is upstream drivers/staging it should be welcomed.

The next question is the license of the firmware. Who is giving you
rights to redistribute it and so on? Its preferred that the authors of
the firmware from the company involved send the patch themselves but
not required.

> The file can be obtained from the source of linux-wlan-ng-firmware - the
> file required is ru010803.hex, and it should be renamed to prism2_ru.hex
> for installation in /lib/firmware.

Under what license?

> Note - doing this will render the linux-wlan-ng-firmware package
> redundant for prism2_usb cards (though the package does have other
> firmware blobs for non-usb cards).

Those packages should die then.

  Luis