[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox Unstable Image 2012.0819 Available

[Nick Daly]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 4:55 PM, bnewbold wrote:
>
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2012, Nick M. Daly wrote:
>
>> Freedom Maker: https://github.com/nickdaly/freedom-maker
>>
>>  - The weekly image has wireless again!
>
>
> Does wireless work "out of the box" for anybody?

Are you building your own image or using the published ones?  In
either case, only images built from the "shiny" branch will have
wireless enabled, and then only when you plug an ethernet cord into
the eth1 slot during the first boot.  The /etc/init.d/first-boot file
controls this process and it removes itself after configuring the
system on the first boot.

> I've poked around online and the only people who seem to have been able to
> successfully run the SD8688 chip in access point mode (without re-compiling
> kernel modules) used the Marvell firmware in combination with specific
> kernels and modules supplied by GlobalScale (dreamplug.google.com) or
> spinfex.com.au. What changed to allow inter-operation between the Marvell
> .bin firmware, the libertas drivers, and the generic 3.2-ish debian kernels?

Reading this, it seems like either I built the images from the master
branch (entirely possible, that branch doesn't have wireless), or you
didn't have an ethernet cord plugged into the eth1 slot during the
first boot.  If you did, you would've downloaded spinfex's drivers
automatically.  I'll make sure to call this out in the notes for this
week's image.

Also, to explain, the Shiny branch contains experimental stuff that
Bdale would never allow in his master branch, like a custom
out-of-tree wireless driver downloaded from a third party site.  It's
new, shiny, and neat, but not the official image.

Nick