Hardware Manufacturers that Actively Support Linux? 650
wirefarm asks: "I know there is are lot of well-supported pieces of hardware for Linux, but I was wondering, which vendors really go out of their way for the community?
While tracking down drivers for a wireless PCMCIA card today, I found that the vendor boasted of having Linux support, but it was seemed that they were actually touting drivers that were community-developed, rather than written with any help of the company. So my question is this: Which companies really stand out when it comes to providing specs and developing drivers?"
Not yet! (Score:3, Informative)
They are still "thinking about it" and won't give out any specs in the meantime.
Re:Not yet! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not yet! (Score:3, Informative)
Just my 2c
Rej
Re:Not yet! (Score:2, Offtopic)
No, not sic. It's a British (and Australian) convention to treat a company as a group of individuals, a plural. This makes a lot more sense than American, which can't make up its mind whether companies are singular or plural. Both of the following are acceptable in American, although the first more so: "IBM is the leader in memory technology; they have just released a new 1TB memory module." "IBM is the leader in memory technology; it has just released a new 1TB memory module."
Disclaimer: my Australian sample size is 1, and my British sample size not much larger. I'm an American who is trying to switch to the British convention for obscure political reasons (I don't like the idea of companies as entities comparable to individuals -- it removes responsibility and encourages unethical behavior).
Intel (Score:5, Informative)
Intel had a src download driver that compiled and worked flawlessly.
Re:Intel (Score:2)
nvidia, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:nvidia, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, I couldn't care less if nvidia's drivers are open sourced. After spending months trying to play Quake II on a Voodoo5 5500, I bought a GeForceII MX 400. I was playing within 5 minutes of installing the card.
I've owned an Intel Pocket Concert MP3 player for over a year...still can't use it on Linux...(yes, there is a project in ALPHA on freshmeat...and it's been in Aplha for the same ammount of time that I've owned the player.
My concern with Linux drivers for hardware begins with "If the fscking thing supported at all?" and ends with "Hmmm. WHich kernel am I going to have to use today?". If a vendor actuallly takes the time to give me drivers, then fantastic. I'm just not going to quibble about the open source thing.
I'll fight that battle when MOST vendors include drivers. Until then, I'm happy just to be able to use my shiny toys.
Re:nvidia, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
The choice of what license to use must be made completely based on the project. I assume in nVidia's case they don't want to give up the specs because they feel that it would help enable people to reverse engeneer their product (that's only a guess), but they still want to support free software.
Re:nvidia, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Binary only drivers are inferior. Even when you have an open sourced kernel module to intermediate. The argument would be less unreasonable if it was source vs. open source, but it's not. It's binary only vs source available.
In any case, nVidia wants to open source their drivers. The reason I got for them being binary only was that they licensed the AGP code from a third party which is unwilling to open their code. Too bad.
Re:nvidia, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reality appears to be that they think by releasing sources or programming specs, they'll somehow make it easy for a competitor to clone their chips. But as any ASIC engineer knows, that's not true. If it were, everyone would be making Pentium IV clones, since the specs for that are published. The reality is that designing a chip with tens of millions of transistors is a very large amount of work, even with the programming (register) specs.
nVidia did release some source code at one point, but it had been run through the C preprocessor, so it was effectively obfuscated.
I used to buy nVidia-based cards, but now I prefer ATI or Matrox. They may not be as high performance, but to me the support is much more important. Anyhow, I have yet to find anything I do for which the performance of the ATI or Matrox cards is inadequate. I don't have any need for frame rates above 72 Hz.
Re:nvidia, but... (Score:2, Informative)
side rant: ATI on the other hand releases the specs, but seems to do no actual work themselves. This does help produce free drivers, but they take forever! My friends radeon 8500 STILL doesn't work in XFree fully, while my gf4 ti 4600 has been humming along nicely since the day I bought it.
ATI (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ATI (Score:2)
ATI gets a lot of bad press for their drivers for a damn good reason too
Re:ATI (Score:5, Informative)
Circa 1998, this was all anyone ever wanted. Remember the OSS (sound for linux) project? They claimed that if someone bought them a board, or gave them the specs, then they would write a driver for it. And they did, too. I suppose it's reasonable to expect a company to produce drivers for Linux, but remember, there are umpteen billion operating systems out there, and these companies don't have the time or resources to develop for all of them.
Personally, I'd rather have the specs and free drivers that anyone could hack on. I'll bet the NVidia/AMD issue wouldn't have lasted a week (hell maybe not even a day), and with time people will hopefully no longer have a reason to bitch about drivers for ATI hardware.
Project UDI (Score:2)
That's why we should all be supporting Project UDI [project-udi.org] (Uniform Driver Interface). You write a hardware driver once and it works (unchanged) on all UDI-enabled operating systems. What could be better?
Re:Project UDI (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, probably, now... but actually it's not clear that this will be the case forever. Yes, I will point out that Java gets quite a bit faster with each release, but more importantly the hardware gets more diverse year on year. CPUs with big register files, vector operations, 64 bit operations... there's a fair slew of chips out there already, before Clawhammer & co appear, and I doubt if C compilers are going to optimize for all of them. In fact, that's impossible. So step forward the JIT, the guy that knows your hardware, and even your usage patterns and can optimize for both. It's the only practical solution longterm... convinced anyone?
Re:ATI (Score:2)
Since if RMS etc are to be believed hundreds of us(*) then jump in, write free (beer/speach) drivers, if something does not work it gets tweaked/fixed etc..
[Of course that is a bit trollish] What shows a true commitment to the open-source customers is community development, with the manufacturer releasing HW specs, but with them also making some technical resources available to answer the really difficult questions driver development often poses (awkward timings/settings/etc..)
(*) Well.. not me obviously, I can't program C/CPP/ASM at all, and I guess nobody wants drivers written in Perl
Re:ATI (Score:2)
Re:ATI (Score:2)
what should they do ??
oh and the ATI MIPS SOC chip has a linux port
so really ALL of their chips graphics/CPU's support linux and thats better than 99% of the others and definately better than NVidia closed source fscking stuff
regards
john jones
Re:ATI (Score:5, Informative)
No, NVidia actively support Linux/x86. Want to use a GeForce in an Alpha? Oops. By releasing documentation, ATI allow their hardware to be used on all Linux platforms rather than a subset of the popular ones.
Re:ATI (Score:2)
ATI only releases a portion of the specs to a small group of developers who have signed an NDA.
ATI does not release specs for features that are unique to ATIs cards.
So for stuff like hardware iDCT and TV-OUT, ATI has released absolutely no specifications to anyone.
Not to mention the fact that they do not like to give their specs out much so you end up with like 3 people who actually have the specs and everyone else has to reverse engineer the drivers to figure anything out.
Re:ATI (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a vendor who ignores Linux, they give Linux fantastic support at a level beyond any other hardware manufacturer due to the complexity of their effort. It also produces better results than the driver development models you espouse.
Re:ATI (Score:5, Informative)
As another person pointed out, that does little good when trying to use the Nvidia cards on another platform. While the binary driver is their choice, and I applaud the work they have done, there are other reasons to choose an open-source driver.
As for ATI doing "almost nothing," they were, until very recently, paying developers to work on their open-source drivers, in addition to releasing specs, which was all the community asked for.
NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, perhaps
So while the OpenGL implimentation may be very good, the closed source nature of the driver means I'm forced to wait for an officially unsupported, binary-only driver, to be fixed someday, or I have to find an alternative. This seriously decreases the value of the NVIDIA driver and hardware for use where I work and live.
ATI does not suffer from this handicap, and while its OpenGL support may not be as good as NVIDIAs, it does work well, and without the system stability issues incurred by using NVIDIA. In addition, the free and open nature of the ati drivers insures that my hardware will never be orphaned, even if ATI has a change of heart (or financial troubles) down the road. The closed source NVIDIA drivers give me none of those guarantees (though the fallback nv driver helps, as long as you don't need digital out or multi-head support).
Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems (Score:3, Insightful)
I called him a moron because he deserves it. He automatically accuses the original poster of havning hardware issues "that are agp related or something else".
Why is it that so many of you nVidia fan boys refuse to accept the fact that on some pretty common hardware, the nVidia drivers still have problems for some people?!?
Dinivin
Re:ATI (Score:3, Informative)
You see the people who have no trouble, and assume that th because they have no trouble the drivers are great, and hence nvidia is great. And then there's everybody else. Each of my 3 machines have had the X server die on occation running the nvidia driver. I have never seen XFree86 die when running any of the open modules that come with it. The module from nvidia doesn't like if you use 2 cards, wether they be both nvidia cards or otherwise. The nvidia driver doesn't always properly put monitors to sleep when it blanks the screen. I have lost a monitor to this bug. This is what you call great support? Where are the binaries for all the other platforms? Where is the support for non-X related graphics? What if I want a dual head framebuffer console?
Are you trying to tell me that you have never had XFree86 die on you with the nvidia driver? I don't believe you. You either haven't been using it for long, you reboot into windows all the time and never have a session open for very long, or you're lieing.
Here's the point. The binary nvidia drivers for linux suck at what they're intended to do (support nvidia cards on i386 linux boxes), and that doesn't even touch on all the things that they can't do because nvidia doesn't bother letting you (like using them on a mac). The open source driver is good, but it can't do 3d, and it can't support dual-headed cards, so I'm forced to have my session disappear out of under me at random once every month or so, or go out and drop a load of cash on a new, non-nvidia, dual head card. Grrr.
This has nothing to do with philosophy, that's another issue for another time. Doing more then any other manufacturer (which isn't true, unless you only count video) isn't good enough. Why is it that if you're a corporation that buys some nvidia chips, they give you the specs so you can program for them, but if you're a consumer that buys some nvidia chips, you don't get the specs, and you aren't allowed to program for them. Why the double standard. Hell, we even pay more for each chip then some company that's buying in bulk. Is it too much to ask to want to know how to use the device you've spent good money on? What good are all the features if they won't tell you how to turn them on.
NVIDIA: if you're reading this, release the dual head specs! I don't care about 3D support, just let me implement dual head in the open source driver! (And what's up with the splash screen, why do we need to wait for that?)
--
And now, off to be modded down by all the nvidia fanboys with mod points...
Re:ATI (Score:3, Informative)
I'll stick with ATI, who has provided information and money for linux driver development. I have a Radeon DDR AIW, Radeon DDR 64, and a Radeon 8500 (still waiting for 3D on the 8500, but it appears to be coming). I'd stick with them even if they only provided the information.
-Paul Komarek
Re:ATI (Score:4, Insightful)
Or FreeBSD.
Or heaven forbid you want to run the latest development kernel.
And don't even think about trying to run two nVidia cards at the same time with their driver. In fact, I couldn't even get my nVidia card to play nice with a PCI Permedia 2 card.
Frankly, I'd rather not put up with crap like that
Dinivin
Re:ATI (Score:2)
When the Radeon 8500 was launched, the Windows drivers didn't even support Smoothvision, which was a major selling point of the R8500. Oh, let's not forget the Quack3 fiasco, or the poor performance, or the poor stability.
Still, it was better than the XFree drivers at launch, there weren't any. Whereas with the NVIDIA drivers, there are typically official Linux drivers before the card is available.
Siemens and Fujitsu-Siemens (Score:2, Informative)
The general ruel (Score:4, Funny)
Unless it's bleeding edge (Score:2)
Re:Unless it's bleeding edge (Score:5, Informative)
I'll give you the LoseModem point, but CD-RWs? Which cheap CD-RWs have you seen that refuse to work? The breakdown as I've seen it is this:
- SCSI CD-RWs just work.
- IDE CD-RWs made after 1998 all follow the MMC-3 standard, so they work with "append='hdc=ide-scsi'" in
/etc/lilo.conf and "modprobe ide-scsi" executed from /etc/init.d/boot.local .
- Most parport CD-RWs work, but configuration is a pain, they're too slow, and they're expensive.
- About 70% of USB CD-RWs work, as long as you're using a recent 2.4 series kernel. These are also too slow and expensive. If you're not sure which models work, look here [qbik.ch] for recent information.
- Firewire CD-RWs work if you enable the experimental Firewire support in your recent 2.4 series kernel.
If you run into problems, c.o.l.hardware [news] is your friend, as is DejaGoogle [google.com]Re:The general ruel (Score:5, Informative)
The cheapest 10/100 ethernet cards tend use an RTL-8139 wich has good drivers while some of the more expensive cards don't work at all.
Price just isn't a good indicator.
Re:The general ruel (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm guessing that they are figuring that you want the most out of that product when they include linux CD's.
But when it comes to modems they are WinModems, soundcards... forget it! and other devices are the exception.
My cheap little USB Philips camera is supported - although I've never tried to use it for more than a microphone - so there is some devices which price is obvious.
Linksys cards considered harmful (Score:3, Informative)
Before I started using Linux, I bought nothing but Linksys cards. I always bought the "LNE100TX". I thought I was always buying the same card...
The problem is that Linksys has sold about five different cards under that same name. These days the card will actually say "Version 4.0" or whatever on it, but the 2.0 version wasn't labelled (the web site had instructions for how to look at a card and guess whether it was a 1.0 or a 2.0... yuck). I have about four different versions of the "LNE100TX". Some of them have done well for me under Linux; others sucked. I don't want to deal with this ever again.
I was using a Linksys LNE100TX card, I think it was a 2.0, in my Linux server at first. I noticed that my server seemed a bit slow in file transfers using Samba, and I ran some tests: I was getting, not 100 Mbps, but 2 Mbps. Slow indeed.
I asked for help on USENET, and several people told me to get a 3Com 3c905c card. I got one, and I now get 76 Mbps from the same Linux server.
The 3c905c card puts up a menu during boot; you can set it up to boot from a DHCP server. I'm planning to play around with a diskless Linux box with one of these cards and lots of RAM.
A list of the best network cards for Linux:
http://www.anime.net/~goemon/cardz/ [anime.net]
Two really helpful web pages:
http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/ [www.fefe.de]
http://www.scyld.com/network/ [scyld.com]
The USENET thread where people helped me with my problem:
google search for "comp.os.linux.networking Speeding up my server" [google.com]
steveha
Re:The general ruel (Score:5, Interesting)
I was very surprised recently, when I came across a Lexmark laser printer (the E210), that was quite a bit cheaper than any others (US $100.00 after a $50 rebate).
It included a Linux driver that works perfectly with CUPS.
It's not such a big deal to see a printer working well with Linux, but there was even a little penguin on the box -- I was thrilled
database or directory of peripherals? (Score:3)
I don't really care if the manufacturer actively supports Linux. I think that's too much to ask. But I would like to be able to go to a web site somewhere and find out what printer I can buy that will actually work, and where to get a driver.
Re:database or directory of peripherals? (Score:2)
Oh, and some types of hardware have their own HOWTOs, notably Ethernet, Zip drives, and so forth.
Re:database or directory of peripherals? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:database or directory of peripherals? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:database or directory of peripherals? (Score:5, Informative)
- Ethernet drivers: the 8139 chip is used on all kind of cheap cards. Keeping track of the product number wouldn't make sense, as they can change from one week to the next. And that's only one driver...
- Video cards: the two current big companies are NVidia and ATI. And both are now outsourcing the manufacturing of the actual boards, while still making the chips. So a driver for a GeForce2 GTS (what I currently have) won't necessarily make the other goodies on your card work with it: the TV-out works with NVidia binary drivers, but not the video-in which came on mine (ASUS 7700 DLX), although rivatv makes it work OK. BTW, it's the same thing under Windows: if you want to use the latest NVidia drivers (28.32?), you'll lose the video-in because it's supported in ASUS's drivers something, which is a few revisions late.
- And so on...
And don't get me started on motherboards, as it can be very messy.Re:database or directory of peripherals? (Score:3, Informative)
SuSE [suse.com] has such a database [hardwaredb.suse.de]. It isn't very SuSE specific though.
Matrox? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Matrox? - not at all! (Score:2, Informative)
The bad thing about it: The TV Out is NOT supported with Linux, neither with the G550, nor with the G450, only with the rather old G400.
I tried to find out the status about the driver at the Matrox discussion forum and there many people complained about the missing Linux-TV-Out support but no one, really NO ONE got one single answer to this issue.
Moreover some people in this group rumoured that Matrox is even going to drop the Linux support completely. What a Mess! Even worse is that they are not releasing their specs so that someone could write the TV-Out support.
I really feel pissed of by Matrox, I have to state that one of the reasons why I bought the G550 was the TV-Out and now it seems it will never work with Linux. Probably I won't buy from Matrox again after this desaster.
Note: (Score:5, Informative)
3com cards seem to work on everything
Recent Intel network gear
Recent Nvidia
3dfx used to
IBM (even before the Linux money, their laptops worked well)
Re:I second this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is akin, in some cases, to saying "come on in and take the kitchen sink while you're at it" for hardware manufacturers.
The Linux community (and the OSS community at large) needs to get over this. Open Source is fine and grand, but it's not always viable. With that in mind, a company should either make the interface available, or make reliable, fast, and solid drivers available on a regular basis.
Those that choose neither may very well be reviled. Those that choose one or the other should be praised. And those that choose to reveal the interface AND help in writing the drivers should be revered.
But bitching about a company that chooses to keep trade secrets secret is really f'ing stupid.
Matrox and Nvidia (Score:2, Informative)
Creative Labs (Score:5, Informative)
http://opensource.creative.com/
Cheers!
Re:Creative Labs (Score:2)
Zero marks for (Score:3, Interesting)
UMAX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Zero marks for (Score:2)
Linksys (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Linksys (Score:2, Interesting)
Nvidia... (Score:5, Informative)
Speed is now at the same level of Windows, features seem to be there as well (I don't remember if everything works at every resolution yet or no), and over time they have become stable enough to be used as primary XFree drivers (in the beginning I used them only when I needed openGL support).
Given their work on the driver, I'm willing to live with their closed-sourceness. It's when it doesn't work and I cannot look in it to fix that I become less tolerant....
Re:Nvidia... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Option "TwinView"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30 - 110"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50 - 160"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1600x1200; 1600x1200,NULL"
To my XFree86Config-4 to enable duall-head configuration pleases me to no end.
X running at 3200x1200 on 19" and 22" monitors is just too sweet.
Now if only I could get the GNOME menu bars to extend across both desktops...
3ware (Score:5, Informative)
nividia and PCtel (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite a bit, actually. (Score:2)
coming from employee's of many popular hardware companies. NEC, Promise, IBM, SGI, SUN, to name a few.
Then there's the ever so popular drivers developed by NVIDIA, closed source unfortunately, but that's
a company policy iirc.
Agere and 3Com (Score:2)
I don't know the quality of either, but from what I hear, Agere's drivers are good for linux. I know they are for other operating systems.
Matrox (Score:3, Informative)
Compaq (Score:3, Informative)
For USB scanners: Epson (Score:5, Informative)
Mandrake linux detected my 640U flawlessly, and it works great. And on top of that, it scans better and faster than my old scanner, which I killed while trying to get it working under linux
Re:For USB scanners: Epson (Score:2)
However, watch out; one scanner (the 1250) doesn't work under linux. Check out the link from the previous article for a complete rundown of supported printers and how well they work before you buy!
Many do.. (Score:2, Informative)
- Well..
- Matrox
- nvidia
- intel
- ibar (a.k.a ibm
;)
- HP (deskjet printers)
- OKI (4w driver was sponsored by them)
- AMD
- ATI (sortof. at least their linux drivers sucks as much as windows one..)
- ... pretty much more.
Jeesus christ this lameness filter gets my ass. no wonder there's THGSB week going on. This is SO lame.Re:Many do.. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is because the special ATI hardware optimizations integrate better with X than they do with Windows. Of course, this is only possible with > X4 since that's when all the XVideo stuff was introduced.
BTW: ATI does not provide specs to the community. They provide only a portion of their specifications to a very small number of developers who have signed an NDA. The aspects of their cards that they feel are important to their bussiness model (i.e. TV-Out, hardware iDCT) they have released nothing for.
Re:Many do.. (Score:2)
Go ahead. that's what M2 is for.
The question was about active support for Linux. I consider writing the driver as one.
nvidia
Bzzt.. wrong! nVidia provide binary-only drivers. There are stability issues, and there's no way they're going to be resolved, because no-one's got the source to fix it.
So how do you think Windows issues are resolved? By peerin' over source, huh?
BTW, I own a GF2MXPCI and nvidias drivers DID crash my computer evry 3hours. that was about 3 releases ago, I use now nv driver instead, I'm not a gamer.
And remember, there's a hellot more to nvidia than simple graphics. They're into chipsets now, too. It ships OSS as of now.
3ware... (Score:3, Informative)
Good to hear (Score:2)
So I've given up on that and ordered a 3ware 6410 for $99. True hardware IDE RAID5 for under $100...not bad. Good to hear they excel at support. We'll see how it goes when I get it in a few days. *eagerly awaits*. I especially like the fact you can download a full source driver tarball from their website. But of course the driver has been in the kernel since mid-2.2 days.
Snap up those 6000 series, it looks like they are discontinued (and 7000's start at $250 and are 64bit only! ack!).
hit and miss... (Score:4, Informative)
HP is also supporting RedHat on it's new Itanium servers, and also supports RedHat with its mid-range storage arrays. They seem to be testing the waters, and I think they are doing all right for such a large and slow moving company.
Samsung is also supporting their printers, by offering Linux drivers and Linux phone support (minimal, but it is there). This is a good thing.
Qlogic and Emulex both support linux with some of their fibre channel HBA's.
So as you can see, you kind of have to pick and choose who you get our stuff from. The corporations are still in the "test the waters" phase for the most part, before they dive in to linux head first. They don't want to get burned by wasting money doing all the work if it will not pay off. In another 3 years, I think Linux support will be fairly mainstream as far as business server and workstation equipment go, but it may still be hit and miss in the consumer market (i.e. webcams, cheap USB scanners, cheapo printers, etc.)
Oops (Score:2)
Re:hit and miss... (Score:2)
the scanner division is not really HP. it's still the origional company and ran the same way it was when it was bought by HP. the scanner people still act like they are holier than god and that linux is evil and they wont waste any time with such as an obscure operating system. (Their attitude not mine) and they think the off the shelf chipset they used in today's usb scanner is a company secret and HP in it's entierity will collapse if you discover what it is..
the printer guys started life when you onyly had Unix and they look at linux as a welcome draw back to the Unix roots... same with trhe server guys...
it's all the microcosims insode the corperate whole.. it will take either mass firings or a iron fist from above to get the scanner group on the linux bandwagon... and the CEO/CTO/CFO/EIEIO dont give a rats ass about anything other than seeing the Profits line move upwards.
DLink and a noname laptop (Score:4, Informative)
Gigabyte has been good to me. (Score:2, Informative)
Matrox seems to be good too, as I've never had trouble getting their video boards to work right out of the box with X (as I understand it the Matrox folks are more helpful than most to the X developers).
That said, Promise is clearly bad for refusing to release their drivers in source form (I guess they think their software RAID technology is so advanced it would give their competitors a great benefit--or maybe they are embarassed to let us see it). Logitech have never been friendly to the OSS world about their QuickCam cameras. I think a lot of printer manufacturers have been a nuisance in this regard (I gave up on trying to figure it all out and bought a Postscript-capable network printer). I'd be curious about good and well supported inkjet printers, though...
Oh, yeah, our Microtek X6EL scanner works great with Linux and SANE. I don't know if the manufacturer is to be credited partially or if the driver author was just heroic in his efforts, but it works exceedingly well.
There are quite a few ! (Score:5, Informative)
RedHat Hardware Channelse . tml [redhat.com] ..)
http://www.redhat.com/marketplace/channel_hardwar
(among others, there are Dell, Egenera
Linux Hardware
http://www.linuxhardware.org/ [linuxhardware.org]
Linux at IBM
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/ [ibm.com]
Linux at Compaq
http://www.compaq.com/products/software/linux/ [compaq.com]
It is a safe assumption that hardware from the 2 above manufacturer will be well supported, since they are supporting Linux heavilly.
Last but not least, make sure to read the Howto:
Linux Hardware compatibility HOWTO http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/ [tldp.org]
BusLogic (Mylex) (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, I remember they wrote all their own linux drivers for their scsi cards...
Lynksys (Score:2)
If you want to share a dot matrix, laser, and inkjet with your Linux/Win mix LAN, this is a good way to go. TCP and several other network protocols are supported and can be enabled/disabled per your needs. It does not provide spooling. A machine configured to spool the jobs will be needed if you desire this feature. Otherwise the printers appear (and function) as local printers via the driver. 2 of the 3 ports support bi-directional centronics printers.
NVIDIA For One.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the truth is it would be competivley BAD for Nvidia to release the specs, yes others have, they choose not to, thats fine with me, they do provide GOOD drivers, and the SRPMS, as well as tared gzipped kernel modules for you to compile on any Linux setup you wish, the actually libs are closed source but hell they DO provide drivers for an OS that accounts for a VERY small portion of their sales market.
There are other vendors that provide Linux support, to be honest If I was in charge of a HW company, I wouldnt, I would provide the specs under some kind of closed agreement to 3rd party developers.
NVIDIA Does provide nice linux drivers, I have, unlike other never had any problem, they release newer version and each generation (for the most part) they get better what more can you ask....(and please dont say provide the specs, if you are thinking or saying that Im betting you have no experince in engineering hardware for a commercial market where competition, especially in th 3d accel, is just downright evil)
Re:NVIDIA For One.... (Score:2)
But I have two NVIDIA cards to support dual heads. Unfortunately their driver crashes immediately if you try to use it on both cards simultaneously. The only way I can use two heads is to run NVIDIA's driver on one card (which gives me video acceleration) and the old, open-source driver on the other card, which gives me no acceleration.
So while I appreciate NVIDIA is trying, their drivers are not perfect, and thus they should either open up the source, or the specs.
Manufacturers may help, but... (Score:2)
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If the hardware is top end, and likely to be owned by Linux people (gaming graphics cards, hotrod modems, cool peripherals) then they are fairly likely to work, with obvious super-high end exceptions. Top end hardware also usually follows specs for standard stuff (like standard SVGA, etc)
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If hardware is low end, forget it. Most of it is manufactured in bulk for Windows only, may have some proprietary code where standards would have done, and is less likely to be owned by a Linuxer anyway. Exceptions below*
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Latest products : unlikely to work because drivers won't have had time to get integrated into kernel development, however modules may be available. Again, if it follows standards then it may work (with performance hit) with generic drivers anyway
I have seen 3Com mentioned, well there's a case in point where they are industry standard network card people. Loads of people have 3Com cards. Loads of people having certain hardware means it's likely to be supported, however....* Very popular shitty low end hardware may work due to good hacks by lots of owners, however reverse engineering isn't an exact science and strange hardware stuff means only hardware which is technically acceptable in it's I/O style will work.
Manufacturers who only develop for Windows are most likely to be found having market share in low end products. The top class lot are much more likely to work. Peripherals that are little more than I/O ports which are instruction driven from host processing (huge binary drivers required) won't work with Linux unless the manufacturer releases all the specs.
I would say that manufacturers make regular business judgements on all their support: because Linux doesn't have market share enough to make it a sales point to support "end user" hardware and they won't release code (because competitors making low end shit will steal it and obfuscate it as a Windows locked binary) but server hardware is supported rather more quickly, because the server market share for Linux is substantial enough.
Watch for drivers being GPL, but not in kernel (Score:3, Informative)
I work for a company that will be releasing firmware for our devices, and a script that makes it work with hotplug. We can GPL.
I worry that drivers like these won't get the attention that ones in the kernel do because they aren't included.
I hope that there will be some common method of installing firmwares or a commmon repository of firmwares in the future.
Linux users seem to depend on drivers being included with the kernel, having nothing else to get.
Wireless cards (Score:2, Informative)
I dont mind spending a few dollars more to support a company/product that supports my choice to use linux [cisco.com]. It was well worth the extra $ to plug it in, run the install, and connect to the network at my college in under 5 minutes.
AdvanSys (Score:2)
Adaptec, Belkin and !Creative (Score:3, Informative)
Belkin also does many of the same things. I know that belkin has a rather wide variety of hardware they sell, however with their UPS's I know for sure that linux is very well supported. Their upsd and ups monitor are closed source but they work very well. They are also rather well documented.
There is one company that really bugs me though and that is creative. They have opensource.creative.com. They've made many announcments and claim bragging rights for supporting the linux community. The truth is however every driver for a creative device out there has been written by the community with barely any input from creative. On the emu10k1-audigy driver mailing list there's a guy.. I forget his name.. who works for creative that does get info from time to time for the development team, but it always seems like he has to beg or plea for the info he wants to get. Usuaully it seems as if he just asks someone who is coding the windows driver or helped design the hardware without getting approval first from management. I'm not implying anything here other than creative is not actively supporting crap.
Adaptec (Score:2)
The community writing drivers is their support (Score:3)
Lexmark puts a Penguin on their Boxes (Score:2, Informative)
False statements (Score:2)
I then tried to make the card work under Linux, only to find out that it wasn't supported by ALSA and that though there were some efforts under way, AFAICT nobody has ever been able to output a single sound out of that card. I wonder how many companies use this kind of false publicity with Liunx.
Re:False statements (Score:2)
NDAs, DMCA, etc.. (Score:3, Informative)
I have a laptop with an Intel chipset that has an integrated winmodem that I can't use. Intel is usually very very good about releasing specs (definitely something I'd say they're better at than AMD and Via), but due to proprietary technology, no specs are available, and I can't get the damn thing to work.
I always get confused when this happens. I always thought that the proprietary-ness of an object was contained within that object. Why companies are so scared to release info on how to get something to work is beyond me. I guess there are some decent reasons for the Macrovision problem (I hate the reasons (it's illegal in the US to not have Macrovision protection, AFAIK), but they are valid nonetheless).
I hope that Linux will pull some of these companies away from that line of thinking..
Anyway, I don't know if it's still true, but Epson used to release quite a bit of info about their printing languages. I think HP did as well, at least until they got into their winprinter phase. They seem to be loosening up.
Hmm.. I think that some of the best companies in this regard have low profiles. All of the big names I can think of have made some pretty poor choices, IMHO.. A lot of companies seem to want to release just enough information to keep Linux users happy.
I think it's best when companies release this information, though. When the specs are opened up, it means that the product can have a much longer life cycle. As long as there's someone who is interested in keeping a driver working, it'll work. I bet there's a bunch of stuff that's supported in Linux that doesn't work in Windows anymore..
The Role of Hardware Design (Score:3, Informative)
Rather than invent new protocols, command sequences, and interfaces, they can support a standard interface across their whole product line.
This makes it easier for the open-source developers, but it also makes it easier for the company itself -- hardware designers, in-house developers, and support people. In many cases, an old driver can be used, perhaps slightly updated to manage a few new features. This reduces the amount of redevelopment and therefore reduces the opportunities for bugs to sneak in -- regardless of the platform.
Some good examples come to mind:
- HP scanners. The HP scanner protocol has been pretty much stable for years, and the same command set has been used on the USB scanners as the SCSI scanners. You can take a current SCSI scanner and use it with a driver from 6 years ago. Yes, the protocol is proprietary, but it's well documented and well understood, and it's not changed at whim.
- DPT controllers (old). These used the EATA (extended ATA) interface across the product line. EATA was well-documented, multi-vendor, and stable. It provided basic compatability with ATA (IDE host adapter) specs but could then take off from there. New cards needed tweaking but not wholesale driver rewrites.
- Most SCSI tape drives. These all use the standard SCSI tape command set, even though they have very different capabilities. (Contrast this to OnStream drives, below).
Some bad examples:
- Early OnStream tape drives. Although the newer units understand standard SCSI tape protocols, the early units used an unnecessary proprietary variation. There were reasons for the variation -- but the fact that the newer drives understand the standard command sets indicates that the variation was not necessary.
- Video cards. Why can't successive video cards from the same manufacturer each support a superset of the previous capabilities, so that you could use the previous driver to start, then eventually add the new functionality to the driver to fully support the latest card?
- Many advanced laser printers (this is a cross-manufacturer issue). I have yet to see two different makers that use the same paper-source-select or staple-enable codes. If PCL and PostScript and PJL are all standardized for other functions, why not source-select and finisher options? It wouldn't require an ANSI subcommittee, just one or two face-to-face meetings or a couple of days of faxes and e-mails.
In most cases, these are engineering problems. The first-generation products need to be designed with some foresight -- version numbers, capability registers, extensible command sets, protocols that can be implemented over different interfaces -- so that later product generations can interoperate, even when they support features which we can't even dream about now.
-Chris Tyler
EDT (Score:3, Informative)
3ware (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't actually used their IDE-RAID cards, but everyone I've heard from speaks very highly of them.
Paul.
Re:Typical response (Score:5, Funny)
"..I'm running on Linux..."
"O.K. Go to Start... Settings... Control Panel..."
"No. I'm not running Windows, I use Linux".
"On a Mac?"
"I just need to know the DNS numbers."
"O.K. What's the problem again?"
"My connection has been working fine. I ping IP addresses but can't resolve domain names. I think you guys switched your DNSs IPs."
"......"
"Do you have some numbers beside something that says 'DNS' or 'Domain Name Server'"
"....... Oh yes."
"Can I have them."
...
Re:Typical response (Score:2)
Re:HP (Score:2)
Re:HP (Score:2)
? Printers don't have to speak PostScript. It makes things easier when they do, since everything speaks PostScript under Unix, but there are PostScript->(printer native data format) converters out there. They typically go by the name "print filters", and every distro includes a metric arseload of them.
PCL is pretty standard, so PostScript->PCL print filters are mature and stable. Your distro's setup tool (YaST, "setup", DrakConf, linuxconf, whatever) almost certainly has a "setup printer" option in it. Use this if you can--it's generally pretty easy, and involves letting the parport auto-detection work, or picking your printer from a list of models. If that doesn't work, try going to linuxprinting.org [linuxprinting.org] , entering your printer's model# into the search box, and following the directions.
Re:Any company.... (Score:3, Funny)
Marketing guy to Engineer: "So let me get this straight. If you guys make a huge, processor intensive driver that takes over the function of the dsp chip on current modems, then we can cut our costs by 4/5ths?"
Engineer: "Yes, but it'll suck and the drivers will only work on windows because that's all our programmers know."
Marketing guy: "Doesn't matter. Everyone uses windows anyway.We can market it as a win-modem for a lower cost!"
Marketing guy to bean counter: "We can make new modems for 4/5th the price of current modems with these new drivers! We can either slash prices on the new stuff or increase our profit margin to ridiculous new heights!"
Bean counter: "Excellent! Tell the CEO right away!"
And thus it began...