Sometime Today, Rony Bill assembled some asciibets to say:
The reason for writing this mail is not to find out what went wrong but
to suggest to the kernel writers that just like the Windows OS, Linux
too could have a streamlined and simple method of installing device
drivers.
I won't tell you why it isn't that easy. All I'll tell you is this:
Windows is one system. There is only one system architecture on which
it will work. There is only one set of APIs that it provides. You are
guaranteed that no matter what the user has installed, a basic set of
APIs, including GUI APIs are available.
On linux, this is not the case. You cannot even assume that people have
keyboards, monitors and mice. A system will work perfectly with no
console I/O devices. Even if these do exist, one cannot assume that the
APIs that you want exist. It just isn't possible to write code that
will run everywhere seamlessly as a binary. Providing source code means
that people will build whatever application they need against their
current set of APIs based on their current capabilities.
That said, what's wrong with "rpm -i driver-version.architecture.rpm"?
Drivers are already provided in this fashion. IBM just didn't provide
it.
Philip
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