Ken Foskey wrote:
On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 06:08 +1000, Martin Visser wrote:
To the community.
Jon's experience probably really demonstrates why Linux isn't going to go
mainstream anytime soon. While I would say 90% of people are going to have
hardware that just works with the most current release of most distros, it
is the 10% that have issues that really stings.
Surely this hurdle needs to be overcome. With the likes of Canonical,
Redhat, Novell and the like wanting this to work surely there is a need for
some sort of integration centre that hardware vendors can submit their
gadgets for driver development assistance, and qualification? I know that
they do do some of these things and a lot of problems like video and
suspend/resume seem a lot more predicable.
Or is this simply never going to happen and we just need to put up with it
considering the effect of aggressive competition and the need to get new
stuff out there all the time.
Installed windows on non-mainstream machines lately. You have to find
drivers, have conflicts of dlls and other things.
I am not saying that it is not a problem, just not doom and gloom.
<snip>
It is worth bearing in mind that Microsoft once did deals
with Hardware suppliers and Hardware suppliers basically
had/have to comply.However, the take home message from
Jon's experience is the was a driver out there, so the
manufacturers are obviously on board (difficult to write
drives without the specs).
However, one of the issues is licensing. WiFi as we all know
is a licensensed technology, with royalties flowing through
to CSIRO. Similarly for DVD/MPEG2. However, my understanding
is that in both these cases the license is in the hardware
not the software or at least not at the operating
system/driver level. Alternatively, if the hardware ships
with a license for the Windows software this should be
transferable for use in the Linux software - as the Windows
software and embedded license is redundant.
A couple of years back, I bought a digital TV tuner that
only came with a Windows driver with a view to running it
under linux. I subscribed to the list and learnt a bit about
what was involved. One of the issues seemed to be the
hardware supplier was not keen for the specs to get into the
public arena.So, the linux community may need to make do
with closed source drivers.
If SLUGers are interested in getting a feel for the issues
try googling AF9015
Marghanita
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Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202
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