Bugzilla Bug 40574

Native Linux driver for Prism GT/Duette/Indigo 802.11g chipset cards

Created an attachment (id=25069) [edit]
net-wireless/prism54-driver/prism54-driver-20040204.ebuild

gentoo-dev-sources already includes support for Prism54G. Asking for the same
patch in gentoo-sources seems like a better idea then having a separate ebuild
in the tree.
At least to me :)

Actually, it makes sense cause not every one uses gentoo-dev-sources. (i'm an
avid mm-sources fan, for instance). I've actually got an ebuild for this as
well, but i've been finishing up a firmware.eclass for handling the sensitive
binary firmware downloading issue. I'll hopefully get some variant of this into
portage soon. Thanks for the ebuild!

Yup, I use developement-sources-2.6.2, which has no support for prism54. What
is the issue with firmware? Its downloaded directly from prism54.org, so
legally its ok, and gets uploaded and run on the card rather than host CPU, so
doesn't affect the GPL-ness of the kernel.

Well, the prism54 people distribute it seperate from their driver tarball, so
obviously there's *something* amiss with just distributing the firmware
normally. I'm making inquiries currently about what we are or aren't allowed to
do. Until i hear for sure, i'll be adding it using my new firmware.eclass soon.

Once i hear word it's fine to just add it to SRC_URI (which means it gets
mirrored lots of places, etc) I'll change it, until then, i'm not willing to
risk putting Gentoo in a tight spot. (:

Check out http://prism54.org/firmware/:

"There are only a few firmware files out there. In this page we list a collection of them by version number. We do not yet have a re-distribution license for them by Intersil (or globalspanvirata or Conexant) but since Intersil wrote the original GPL driver and then supported the Open Source community in mantaining it, we figure it's only fair we're allowed to redistribute them here. Our official permission is pending. We do not have a "usage" license but should we get one, I'm pretty sure it'll just say you can use the firmware in whatever way you want except reverse-engineering."

I would suggest RESTRICT="nomirror", however there are also legal issues with media-libs/win32codecs and nobody seems to mind mirroring that, so I doubt in reality it will be a problem either way.

Okay, just added this in as the package "prism54" For now we're mirroring a
20040208 tarball and have RESTRICT="nomirror" so the firmware images isn't
mirrored. I've emailed prism54-devel asking for info (also about if it's okay
to add this to liveCDs eventually) and also emailed gentoo-dev for their input
given the current info the prism54 firmware page.

PLEASE test this snapshot for me as i don't have the hardware to test this on.
report back here. Thanks for all the info.

It doesn't compile. I get sandbox errors even though I have FEATURES="buildpkg
ccache  noauto notitles" in /etc/make.conf 

make -f scripts/Makefile.build obj=scripts
  gcc -Wp,-MD,scripts/.fixdep.d -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2
-fomit-frame-pointer        -o scripts/fixdep scripts/fixdep.c
ACCESS DENIED  open_wr:   /usr/src/linux-2.6.1/scripts/.fixdep.d
cc1: Permission denied: opening dependency file scripts/.fixdep.d

This is with portage-2.0.50

You might need to explicitly turn off sandbox with FEATURES="-sandbox". You
normally don't have to, but perhaps portage changeed its behavior.

Closing due to lack of feedback.