Dear Jerry, I know exactly how you feel! I've felt the same way for a whole week now.. but let me tell you a story.
About 8 days ago, I shelled out $450 for 2 things: 1 Belkin PCI FireWire Card and 1 Yamaha 16/10/40 External FireWire CDRW drive
Why this card/drive? Don't ask, it's complicated.
Anyways, I was determined to get it to work on my SuSE 7.1 box. I compiled the ieee1394 (FireWire) stuff into modules and started working with it. That lasted all of about 15 seconds. Nothing worked. Box locked up when I did simple things like insmod the modules.
Boy was I frustrated. Sound familiar?
Well, I decided that hey.. this is Linux, and Linux users don't get frustrated, they get involved!
So I joined the Linux1394 FireWire Mailing list located on or around the
Steven, do yourself and all of us a favour, buy yourself a nice beer. : ) So nice and great to know another success story for Linux. Dennis/sg page:
http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/faq.html (this is from my bookmarks ;-)
and started sending out feeler emails.. trying to see if I could get some help.
Over the next 3 days, I didn't receive much of anything, just a "try this" and a "try that".. it seemed like it was going very slowly, and I became worried.
Then today, I received an email asking me how I was doing with it. I replied back "not too good" and then the best thing happened.. a conversation via email ... back and forth .. try this .. didn't work... try that... didn't work, but this happened and it's not longer doing this or that.. ok, good, now try this.
Within a couple of hours, I had a fully working Yamaha CDRW drive! The first one that they have seen working, might I add.
Now I can go about my business as an end user and know that not only did I contribute to the process, but that the process contributed to me.
On no other operating system can you get this level of support. Not for free, and most likely not for any price.
UDF? It'll happen. Especially if you get involved.
Have a great night. -Steven