On Friday 09 May 2008 17:48, John wrote:
True windoze takes a long time to install but hardware drivers are always available. Not so with linux.
Sadly enough, that's true in many cases. But it's the hardware makers who are to blame if they don't provide drivers or at least specifications how the hardware works so Open Source developers can write drivers.
If the know-how of a piece of hardware is mostly in the (Windows) driver, they won't open that stuff up, so Open Source developers have to rely on reverse engineering to get anything working. Many inkjet photo printers and other kinds of hardware fall into that category.
So whom do you blame for this? Bit of a missunderstanding here I meant the software interface to the driver
On Friday 09 May 2008 17:03:01 Stefan Hundhammer wrote: they supply. I may also may be being unfair to suse - it's comment that crops up on installation in ubuntu. Clearly they can't but it would be very sensable to work with it until the oss code has something as good or better to offer. It's an interesting area. On 9.3 install I was routed with great glee to the nvidia repository. They were glad that nvidia had done it.
There is also a bit of oss snobbery concerning closed source drivers eg Samsung printers
It's only snobbery up to a certain point. If you used such drivers for a while you will often find out that they are more of a liability than an asset, causing much more trouble again and again than you saved money by buying that cheaper hardware.
I've been there. I learned the lesson that cheap hardware is very often expensive in working hours to get things working. I can't affort cheap hardware any more. ;-)
and why can't for instance nvidia drivers be maintained
Because of licensing issues. If we could, we'd ship the NVidia 3D drivers, but we can't.
Samsung for instance undated a clp500 driver for me in 3days after I complained that it no longer worked.
That's exceptionally good service. But I had personal experiences with the cash'n'carry mentality so many hardware makers have these days. A customer who already paid is no longer attractive for many of them, so they often don't bother to update anything to make it work with more recent Linux versions.
I haven't got round to the printer yet - don't get me going on cups. I expect much fun in that direction as I will install back door with the printer locally using samsungs install and then re route it manually to an axis printer server. Seems to be the only way of doing it. Hope it works. It has so far but needs a KDE desktop facility with root privileges otherwise the printer can't be enabled. (As far as I'm aware) Out of interest samsungs driver seems to support there current and earlier cheap colour lasers on all linux distro's so it should be maintained.
CU -- Stefan Hundhammer
Penguin by conviction. YaST2 Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Nürnberg, Germany
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