-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Monday September 29 2003 07:42, Fergus Wilde wrote:
On Monday 29 September 2003 10:22, Curtis Rey wrote:
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<rant on>
Hi all. Ok, so Linux is coming along nicely (despite the market games of some). However there are glaring holes in some things, that aren't necessarily Linux' or any of the distros fault per se.
One thing is scanner support. Ironically Mac OSX is have this issue as well. I have to fairly nice scanners. One is an HP 4470c and the other is a Umax 4000U. Neither of these are support by Linux, or moreover, are not support "for" Linux by particular venders OEMs.
I the case of both of these devices the manufacturer won't cooperate with the devs at the sane project and release any info so they can build a driver/s.
I have been googling the hell out of this subject and this is why I've come to the conclusion that the devs have to Backwards engineer these devices and are still fight with them. in the case of the HP, it moreover a RealTek issue since the make the chip/components that are used in the HP device. To the devs credit they have tried repeatedly to contact Realtek about this and have gotten the cold shoulder (aka no reply ).
Now I think that, since Linus is coming in to its own, that perhaps the Rep for the Linuc companies should be able to convince thosein charge could be persuaded by Linux/Linux distros to be a littlefriendly. But Ii'm not holding my breath.
I strongly thing the scanner (as well as other common SOHO/SMB devices) software issues need to be addressed. Perhaps have SuSE exec meet with the company and persuad these OEMs to help out a little. Especially since these products (Umax and HP 4470) are no longer sold by HP.
So, what's the big deal for these guys? The devices are no longer sold in the stores - and therefore what difference does it make if the open up the drivers that would just be sitting in the office on a disc. But Oh Well.
<rant off>
Epson, by contrast, have made a big effort, and I use their kit with SuSE on a daily basis. Perhaps the best way to begin chipping away at the lack of co-operation from other vendors is to drop them a line politely telling them why you're going to buy Epson (or another co-operative manufacturer) rather than their product. I suppose a quick line to Epson to tell them you bought their kit *because* of Linux support is indicated too.
Frustrating situation though. Cheers Fergus
Ya, the other thing to consider is that usually corporations change at a snails pace. Considering that Linux is reaching critical mass and the adoption of Linux is beginning to snowball, one might realistically summize that the suits my only catch on to this months down the line. And also, they often have the mentality to steer clients to their newer products and therefore they believe that people may feel no choice but to "upgrade" to a newer product. This is what the company wants because it means new revenue - naturally. However, a lot of people don't have the spare cash to throw down everytime they drop a former product. My wife is having the same problem with Mac OSX. The HP 4770c scanner worked/had drivers in Mac OS 9.x but it is unsupported in OSX. The same happened with printers in XP (though much of the blame is on M$ and it "certified driver" program - bleh). What I guess really bothers me is that the chip makers are really the bottom line with this issue. I mean I have read several emails of the various sane devs that state they have sent several emails to companies like Motorola, RealTek, etc... That have gone unanswered repeatedly. So this begs the question - is this a matter of protecting proprietary/trade secrets that are vaible or just a blanket policy not to release any info regardless? Cheers, Curtis. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/eGZoiqnGhdjCOJsRAgfqAJwMAaXre7j7C6RVdS5YeNnvsqQUKQCdEOWj FUsTxif8MKHwKwslLfdd4t8= =7uGw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----