From Fedora Project Wiki

Fedora Firmware Special Interest Group

Mission

Goal: to get all legally available firmware needed to get devices to work packaged for / in Fedora so that a users devices which require firmware will just work

We aim to accomplish this goal through a variety of activities:

  • Creating packages of firmware
  • Contact manufacturers asking them under which conditions their firmware may be redistributed
  • Contact manufacturers requesting them to modify their firmware redistribution conditions, to make them Fedora compatible


Available firmware

Tools for loading/extracting/dealing with firmware

Firmware and related tools being packaged

  • arduino-rambo - RAMBo 3D printer electronics firmware for use with Arduino IDE.

Firmware currently missing from Fedora

Notice that this is just a list of firmware which we would like to see in Fedora, firmware in this list has NOT been checked yet for proper licensing.

Networking Devices

  • 3Com Bluetooth Wireless PC Card 3CRWB6096
  • Thomson SpeedTouch 330 USB
  • sil (for prism and prism_pci)

Multimedia Devices

  • AV7110 based DVB cards ( link )
  • OREN or51211 and 51132 demodulators ( link )
  • various USB TV devices ( link )
  • R5U87x based webcams ( link )

Orphaned Packages

Packagers/Reviewers/People interested

Packaging guidelines

In addition to the standard Packaging:Guidelines, it is important to realise that firmware does not need to be under a free software / oss license. As long as it may be freely redistributed without restrictions, it may be packaged.

List of firmware which we can NOT package

  • b43-firmware and b43legacy-firmware - Broadcom refuses to re-license them under redistributable license. Please, try b43-openfwwf first. Perhaps, you'll be fully satisfied with this drop-in replacement.
  • bluez-firmware - Bluetooth firmware distributed by the BlueZ project. We didn't get permissions from Broadcom to distribute them.

References