[ARMedslack] What's the difference between USB<->serial devices on Arm Slack and Intel Slack?

[Jim Hawkins]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2010, Stuart Winter wrote:

> I'm not too familiar with why the kernel firmware stuff gets built but I 
> suspect it's just because support for a specific driver is compiled in, 
> or is compiled as a module, so the corresponding fw is built and 
> packaged/installed when "make modules_install" is run.

Some of the firmwares needed by the drivers are not created as part of the 
kernel build. They are binary blobs (often extracted from the Windows 
drivers) which get uploaded to the hardware by the Linux kernel drivers to 
make the devices operate as intended. As such, the legality of 
distributing some of them is a bit dubious.

You should be able to install and use the Intel kernel-firmware package on 
an ARMedslack system as it shouldn't contain any code for the host system 
(which is why it's marked as a noarch package).

Cheers,

Jim