David Krider writes:
... The ease of use and strong laptop support in Windows makes these sorts of problems all the more obvious and ridiculous.
Herein lies the problem. Windows, like it or not, still represents a huge majority of the OS running on desktops and laptops. Numbers count, so makers of hardware devices automatically supply drivers and software support for their products, either by including it with the product or giving to MS to be included within Windows. Linux, on the other hand, works on a totally different model. Most drivers and software for devices are developed by people not connected with their makers. In a significant percentage of cases it is done without any documentation or support. Given that, it is quite amazing that Linux works on such a large array of computers and devices at all. Linux is gaining, but it will take time for more vendors to provide direct support. Also, many vendors haven't really figured out the open source philosophy and that sometimes gets to be a problem. As for SCSI CD/DVD drives, most makers of these drives have abandoned SCSI. Sad to say, but their (much) higher prices compared to the IDE counterparts don't help at all. If people don't buy the product then they stop making them. SCSI is alive and strong in the server disk drive business, however, where businesses are willing to pay more for the extra performance and reliability. It's interesting that most of the big servers include an IDE interface specifically for the CD or DVD drive. It's because 1). It's cheaper, and CD/DVD devices are not usually mission critical; 2) They, like us, can't buy SCSI CD/DVD drives anymore. All that said, I still have some older SCSI CD-ROM drives in my machines and they work just fine under SuSE 9.1. -Ti -- Ti Kan http://www.amb.org/ti Vorsprung durch Technik