On 30/05/06, Mathias Homann <admin@eregion.de> wrote:
Am Dienstag, 30. Mai 2006 21:40 schrieb Eberhard Moenkeberg:
On Tue, 30 May 2006, Mathias Homann wrote: http://madwifi.org/suse/ has all you need. ...which is on the net, hence unreachable until i download it. but with no working network, its impossible to download.
i rest my case.
I don't want to downplay any issues you might have, but you are quite clearly on the internet at the very moment that you send that mail, so why not download it and save it to a cd/flash device/floppy/punch card? Sure, it would be nice to have in the box, but I think the reasons for omitting these non OSS drivers are quite valid. I run windows and linux and I have some devices that don't have WHQL certified drivers available. They cause me endless pain and lots of system freezing. SuSE 10.1 never freezes for me. The point I want to make is this, MS resolves driver issues by testing the hell out of them and making the device manufacturer pay for the seal of approval. That isn't an option for linux where it's an uphill struggle to get a driver released at all. The only way that we can really make sure that a driver performs and doesn't mess stuff up is to have access to the source so that bugs can be fixed as the kernel changes. Non OSS drivers will cause nothing but pain in the long run, and accepting them because they are convenient sends entirely the wrong message to the device manufacturers. -- Paul