Linux Blog recommends an interview up on the O'Reilly site with Greg Kroah-Hartman, long-time Linux kernel hacker and the current Linux kernel maintainer for the USB driver core. He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago, which has really caught traction now with more than 300 developers volunteering. The interviewer begins by asking about Kroah-Hartman's claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has. "[One factor is] the ease of writing drivers; Linux drivers are at normally one-third smaller than Windows drivers or other operating system drivers. We have all the examples there, so it's trivial to write a new one if you have new hardware, usually because you can copy the code and go. We maintain them... forever, so the old ones don't disappear and we run on every single processor out there. I mean Linux is 80% of the world's top 500 super computers right now and we're also the number one embedded operating system today. We've got both sides of the market because it's — yeah it's pretty amazing. I don't know why, but we're doing something right."
You will obviously have to use manufacturers non-free driver, as they haven't released the spec for a Hot tub device. The latest patch I have in git fills the tub (although there are some overflowing issues with the latest, compact tubs) but doesn't heat the water yet.
Its no surprise that Linux supports more devices. Just look at various hardware devices that require third-party drivers and sometimes even third-party software to function on Windows.
I will bet you just about any amount of money that the standard kernel for Vista doesn't detect that card. Yes, Windows has third-party drivers, but Windows relies on third-party drivers for everything, Linux does not.
This may be true, but which OS is handicapped by it?
The only advantage to Linux is the more frequent release schedule which allows it to stay current with drivers.
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list. Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Also of note is the influx of what you might call "Basic functionality" drivers for devices such as scanners and multifunction printers - often full feature drivers are not available for these devices even though they technically work on Linux.
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list.
Where windows flounders and linux shines, is with non-current drivers.
I pulled an old voodoo 3 out of an an ancient PC. It was pretty trivial to get debian to recognize it, but after hours of searching, I never found a functional windows XP driver.
3DFX Zone [3dfxzone.it] host a couple of interesting drivers.
Including SFFFT's drivers. These work with Windows XP and XP64 and provide support for Glide (3dfx did release the source for the Linux version) OpenGL (thanks to Mesa3D) and DirectX 9 (at least for the function that the hardware can provide).
But then again, back to the main argument, it's an entirely community effort based on opensource code and such. Stock Windows does not support it, and it's not trivial to find decent drivers for it. Whereas "tdfx" is just a
But, honestly, I'd rather the Linux "basic" driver to the third-party crapware that you have to install to get some printers working. Things that are so slow to do some things make the device (or Windows) totally unusable because of the slowness. It would be one thing if all the drivers were standardized and worked seamlessly but it seems like every device requires yet another crapware extension to use the software.
Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Wrong. Maybe every consumer-level device you can buy today, but I have a nice shiny network card around that needs tweaking to work in Linux, doesn't work at all in Windows (yes, I tried, for more than a day), and only works flawlessly in FreeBSD and Solaris. Dunno where it came from, probably a server somewhere. And don't even get me started on PPC, SPARC et al, where Windows dearest fails to run at all. Which is kinda unfortunate for my Powerbook, but alas, we do have Linux.
People sometimes forget that, despite their ~95% marketshare, not all devices in the world are Windows-compatible, or were ever meant to be.
Absolutely!
As an old time sound card user, the support from Linux until recently has been pretty dire and even now is pretty basic since many cards have included software that goes beyond the "ooh, this card produces sound" front to supporting 5.1 & 7.1 surround sound et al.
Here's a for instance...
I have an E-MU 1212m. Linux say they have drivers for this card. Great it produces sound. However, I have Windows software that let's me interact with that card, that takes full advantage of every input
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list. Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
My computer will not run windows. Yes all the hardware has windows drivers, but those drivers span from windows 98 to Vista. Some of them are not available to download at all, the manufacturer having decided I should buy a new device that costs 5 times as much.
That's a really undersold benefit of Linux-as-we-know-it. Everything is built in, or can be found on the repositories in a way that makes Windows Update look amateurish.
What gets me are those damned Lexmark all in ones. Here in AR I work on a lot of folks PC that aren't the latest and greatest,and they could really use Linux security. But I had to give up even thinking about showing Linux even to those that only use their PC for email and surfing because I'd walk into their house and there sat a Lexmark all in one. And now I'm in the same boat since a customer gave me a new Lexmark when her husband bought her a laser printer. Trying to get it to print,much less scan or fax
I don't know the details of your case, but in general, it is NOT a distro thing. In the case of wifi, anything using the same kernel newer than 2.6.23 should have similar wifi support except for some like Mint that automate ndiswrapper setup.
Hmmm... I've been using the b43 driver since Ubuntu 8.04 came out. It works here. Which flavour of kernel are you using? Sometimes alternate flavours bring out bugs in newer device drivers. For the record, i'm using the plain old boring -386 flavour.
I completely agree with the premise of the summary of the article. (No, of course I didn't read the article) A few years ago, i dug out my old Nikon Coolscan II LS-20 slide scanner. The last windows driver for this device was for Windows 95, so I had an old P233MMX machine dedicated to running it. After a year of storage, windows would no longer operate the scanner. It would report some error that didn't really get me anywhere on Google. I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver a few times. On a lark, I installed Debian 3.0 on a second partition on the machine. I figured it might be a bit of work, but Windows 95 was frustrating me. Much to my surprise, when i opened "The GIMP", and selected Acquire, my Nikon scanner was listed -- and it WORKED!
"Its no surprise that Linux supports more devices."
I say! Hallo over there.
Could some of you fine upstanding penguins please find it in your pint-size reptilian hearts to migrate over here to Van Daemon's Land this season, and help our poor bewildered little FreeBSD creature rebuild his USB nest?
This is no joke, penguin people. Seriously, I need to keep a Kubuntu machine handy just to read the SD cards from my Canon. That simple task crashes FreeBSD. Regularly, reliably crashes it.
I will probably be hunted down and speared with a tiny fork for this. But I think we need some penguin DNA over here, because no one has been able to properly deal with this for the past six years or more.
There's a recent article at Linux.com about the ancient FreeBSD kernel panic involved in this, that has now even tripped up the PC-BSD project. http://www.linux.com/feature/149224 [linux.com]
And now, I must scurry hurry to hide from the fork prongs!
On the other hand, I work in medical research and you don't see any embedded Windows, or straight-out-of-the-box Linux. The reason? You need someone to take responsibility for the system. MS specifically says that Windows is not appropriate for use in critical systems.
The equipment you're working with probably comes from companies like Barco, Agfa, Siemens,... am I right ? The ones I saw in that field all ran proprietary software directly on the hardware or on a very thin proprietary OS. Which is why this equipment is so $-intensive (that, and medical research generally pays whatever bill you present them with).
Sure, you can use it for non-critical tasks. Most hospitals use it for viewing radiological images too. The difference is, that GUI had embedded code sitting there making sure nothing stupid happened. Some engineer had to sign off on that code certifying that it was safe, no matter what hijinks the Windows bit got up to.
Can we get proper links in the summaries. I expected the link in "He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago" (which I've bolded because underlining is filtered out) to point to the program's website [linuxdriverproject.org] rather than back to Slashdot.
If you want to link to Slashdot, then do it this way: "He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago [slashdot.org]"
Yet another example of the irritating blog phenomenon of "reporting" on something without bothering to link back to the source.
A couple of weeks ago I found a project to control a remote control car with an iPhone. Last week someone was interested in doing something similar, so I did a quick Google search for it. In the intervening week dozens of blogs had parroted a description of the project and NOT ONE OF THEM had a link back to it.
I finally found the original, buried a couple of pages down.
Upgraded my Ubuntu server from Feisty (7.04) to Hardy (8.04). The path to Hardy includes Gutsy (7.10). The series of apt-get dist-upgrades went well...then I tried to run apache2. Error:
symbol lookup error:/usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64
I googled...turns out it doesn't remove an old libz file...certain things still refer to it./usr/local/libz.so.1.2.3.3 is the right one, while the links in/usr/local/lib/ point to/usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.3 which is the wrong one. Copy the former into the latter, redo the links, everything's hunky dory.
I think the difference here between Windows and Linux is that I wouldn't have upgraded Windows...I would have reinstalled (going from 2000 to 2003, for example).
No clue about Ubuntu but Gentoo not only detects breakages such as that but can also prevent anything bad from happening until its fixed. Not sure why Ubuntu left the old version.
Posted from a 4 or 5 year old Gentoo install. Updates are smooth.:)
Any files in/usr/local were provided by you, not Ubuntu. I have apache2 installed here on my Ubuntu box, and my/usr/local/lib directory is empty. Debian policy (which Ubuntu is based on) reserves/usr/local 100% for the local admin, and forbids packages from putting anything in that hierarchy except empty directories. (See section 9.1.2 [debian.org].)
Or to put it another way, no,/usr/local/libz.so.1.2.3.3 is not the "right" one. It's another wrong one that happens to be working for you. For now. The right one is/usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.3.3. Next time you upgrade, that/usr/local version is going to bite you in the ass again.
Ubuntu can do a fine job of updating itself, but it's hardly going to be able to upgrade 3rd-party software you installed manually, now, is it?
(Windows is a different case, of course, since Windows doesn't come with any useful software in the first place.):)
There are more drivers because embedded hardware needs drivers to run hardware. You need a driver for your i2c bus. You need a driver to control that LCD panel on your linux-based PDA device. It's like comparing apples with oranges. Windows simply hasn't penetrated into the embedded market like Linux has.
I still don't have Linux support for my creative express card sound device and it is supported on windows.
That's true, but Linux isn't where it could - or should - be. There are many antique 3rd part drivers for Linux for embedded devices and busses (COMEDI doesn't get updated often, DDC's Linux drivers for $1000+ aviation buses haven't been updated in years, VME drivers are equally badly maintained), where comparable drivers for Windows are nice, shiny and up-to-date... even though you know damn well that's not where the market is. It seems to me that some hardware vendors release Windows drivers because they
but I moved to Ubuntu anyway a few years back when M$ started turning off purchased, but unregistered, copies of Office. So I had my share of issues back in the day.
A while ago I was helping somebody get some software running and printing under Windows, and . . . gawd! . . . they had to install a driver. It's been a couple of years since I had to do anything so primitive. Everything just works.
That's when it finally dawned on me that the times they are a'changin.
Hehheh, yeah it's not easy to go back to the old ways. Fixing such issues on Windows, you immediately miss sudo, tail -f/var/log/messages, lsmod, et cetera.
all this back patting linux people give themselfs blinds them to the obvious failings it has. Does anyone really believe linux has better device support than windows? linux failed on 2 of my laptops and i know plenty of people who have given up on wifi. cry all you want about "bad" hardware and vendors who don't release specs, it doesn't make linux anymore attractive.
Drivers do get dropped, usually when they're old enough that no kernel developer actually has access to the hardware, and nobody has submitted patches for years.
Drivers can also be added back in if someone feels like cleaning it up and making it work with a new kernel.
Just because no (active) kernel developer has the hardware does not mean there are no users with that hardware. I've seen drivers removed from the kernel for lack of a maintainer while they were still fully functional -- "ugly code" doesn't matter if it works and people depend on it. Every time a driver is removed, there are end users who complain about it.
God, you're good! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:God, you're good! (Score:5, Funny)
# lslimo > output.txt
and post the output.txt file.
Parent
Re:God, you're good! (Score:5, Funny)
output.txt:
00:00.0 12v Battery
00:01.0 Chassis
00:1a.0 Engine
00:1a.1 Gear box
00:1a.2 Cam belt
00:1a.7 Drive shaft
00:1b.0 Stereo
00:1c.0 Steering wheel
00:1c.4 Steering column
00:1c.5 Horn
00:1d.0 Driver seat
00:1d.1 Front passenger seat
00:1d.2 Hot tub
00:1d.7 Back passenger seats
00:1e.0 Wheels
00:1f.0 Doors
Parent
Re:God, you're good! (Score:5, Funny)
You will obviously have to use manufacturers non-free driver, as they haven't released the spec for a Hot tub device. The latest patch I have in git fills the tub (although there are some overflowing issues with the latest, compact tubs) but doesn't heat the water yet.
Parent
Re:God, you're good! (Score:4, Funny)
Well, apparently Natalie Portman submitted a patch for the Hot tub to handle grits.
Parent
Re:God, you're good! (Score:4, Funny)
run
# lslimo > output.txt
You mean
# roblimo > output.txt
Parent
Re:God, you're good! (Score:5, Funny)
I could, but no guarantees it wouldn't crash.
Parent
No surprise here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No surprise here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be true, but which OS is handicapped by it?
The only advantage to Linux is the more frequent release schedule which allows it to stay current with drivers.
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list. Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Also of note is the influx of what you might call "Basic functionality" drivers for devices such as scanners and multifunction printers - often full feature drivers are not available for these devices even though they technically work on Linux.
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Interesting)
I ahve yet to install a version of windoes that didn't require immediate driver updates.
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where windows flounders and linux shines, is with non-current drivers.
I pulled an old voodoo 3 out of an an ancient PC. It was pretty trivial to get debian to recognize it, but after hours of searching, I never found a functional windows XP driver.
Parent
FYI (Score:3, Insightful)
3DFX Zone [3dfxzone.it] host a couple of interesting drivers.
Including SFFFT's drivers.
These work with Windows XP and XP64 and provide support for Glide (3dfx did release the source for the Linux version) OpenGL (thanks to Mesa3D) and DirectX 9 (at least for the function that the hardware can provide).
But then again, back to the main argument, it's an entirely community effort based on opensource code and such. Stock Windows does not support it, and it's not trivial to find decent drivers for it. Whereas "tdfx" is just a
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd. My install of Win 2k3 works in 2D with my old Voodoo 3 PCI.
Only 2D drivers available? Until it can provide 3D out of the box, this will not be the year od the Windows desktop.
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Wrong. Maybe every consumer-level device you can buy today, but I have a nice shiny network card around that needs tweaking to work in Linux, doesn't work at all in Windows (yes, I tried, for more than a day), and only works flawlessly in FreeBSD and Solaris. Dunno where it came from, probably a server somewhere. And don't even get me started on PPC, SPARC et al, where Windows dearest fails to run at all. Which is kinda unfortunate for my Powerbook, but alas, we do have Linux.
People sometimes forget that, despite their ~95% marketshare, not all devices in the world are Windows-compatible, or were ever meant to be.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No surprise here... (Score:4, Informative)
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list. Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
My computer will not run windows. Yes all the hardware has windows drivers, but those drivers span from windows 98 to Vista. Some of them are not available to download at all, the manufacturer having decided I should buy a new device that costs 5 times as much.
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do I still have to recompile the kernel to get that 3rd party driver to work in linux, or is that one solved?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What gets me are those damned Lexmark all in ones. Here in AR I work on a lot of folks PC that aren't the latest and greatest,and they could really use Linux security. But I had to give up even thinking about showing Linux even to those that only use their PC for email and surfing because I'd walk into their house and there sat a Lexmark all in one. And now I'm in the same boat since a customer gave me a new Lexmark when her husband bought her a laser printer. Trying to get it to print,much less scan or fax
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know the details of your case, but in general, it is NOT a distro thing. In the case of wifi, anything using the same kernel newer than 2.6.23 should have similar wifi support except for some like Mint that automate ndiswrapper setup.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... I've been using the b43 driver since Ubuntu 8.04 came out. It works here. Which flavour of kernel are you using? Sometimes alternate flavours bring out bugs in newer device drivers. For the record, i'm using the plain old boring -386 flavour.
I completely agree with the premise of the summary of the article. (No, of course I didn't read the article) A few years ago, i dug out my old Nikon Coolscan II LS-20 slide scanner. The last windows driver for this device was for Windows 95, so I had an old P233MMX machine dedicated to running it. After a year of storage, windows would no longer operate the scanner. It would report some error that didn't really get me anywhere on Google. I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver a few times. On a lark, I installed Debian 3.0 on a second partition on the machine. I figured it might be a bit of work, but Windows 95 was frustrating me. Much to my surprise, when i opened "The GIMP", and selected Acquire, my Nikon scanner was listed -- and it WORKED!
Parent
Re:No surprise here... (Score:4, Funny)
jav1231:
the guy in #linuxhelp tells me, "Dude, I dunno...mine works!"
... srw:
Hmmm... I've been using the b43 driver since Ubuntu 8.04 came out. It works here.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So the moral of the story is:
Don't buy shitty hardware.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Interesting)
I say! Hallo over there.
Could some of you fine upstanding penguins please find it in your pint-size reptilian hearts to migrate over here to Van Daemon's Land this season, and help our poor bewildered little FreeBSD creature rebuild his USB nest?
This is no joke, penguin people. Seriously, I need to keep a Kubuntu machine handy just to read the SD cards from my Canon. That simple task crashes FreeBSD. Regularly, reliably crashes it.
I will probably be hunted down and speared with a tiny fork for this. But I think we need some penguin DNA over here, because no one has been able to properly deal with this for the past six years or more.
There's a recent article at Linux.com about the ancient FreeBSD kernel panic involved in this, that has now even tripped up the PC-BSD project. http://www.linux.com/feature/149224 [linux.com]
And now, I must scurry hurry to hide from the fork prongs!
Sincerely - a frightened daemon captive
Parent
I don't know why, but we're doing something right. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't know why, but we're doing something rig (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, I work in medical research and you don't see any embedded Windows, or straight-out-of-the-box Linux. The reason? You need someone to take responsibility for the system. MS specifically says that Windows is not appropriate for use in critical systems.
Parent
Re:I don't know why, but we're doing something rig (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, you can use it for non-critical tasks. Most hospitals use it for viewing radiological images too. The difference is, that GUI had embedded code sitting there making sure nothing stupid happened. Some engineer had to sign off on that code certifying that it was safe, no matter what hijinks the Windows bit got up to.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Like this, for example: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ [apple.com]
More devices but... (Score:3, Funny)
My Swedish vibrator still doesn't have Linux drivers [everything2.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My Swedish vibrator still doesn't have Linux drivers [everything2.com]
Note: Human operator not included.
Proper Linking Please (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to link to Slashdot, then do it this way: "He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago [slashdot.org]"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet another example of the irritating blog phenomenon of "reporting" on something without bothering to link back to the source.
A couple of weeks ago I found a project to control a remote control car with an iPhone. Last week someone was interested in doing something similar, so I did a quick Google search for it. In the intervening week dozens of blogs had parroted a description of the project and NOT ONE OF THEM had a link back to it.
I finally found the original, buried a couple of pages down.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux Story (Score:3, Interesting)
Upgraded my Ubuntu server from Feisty (7.04) to Hardy (8.04). The path to Hardy includes Gutsy (7.10). The series of apt-get dist-upgrades went well...then I tried to run apache2. Error:
symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64
I googled...turns out it doesn't remove an old libz file...certain things still refer to it. /usr/local/libz.so.1.2.3.3 is the right one, while the links in /usr/local/lib/ point to /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.3 which is the wrong one. Copy the former into the latter, redo the links, everything's hunky dory.
I think the difference here between Windows and Linux is that I wouldn't have upgraded Windows...I would have reinstalled (going from 2000 to 2003, for example).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing to do with drivers. :P
No clue about Ubuntu but Gentoo not only detects breakages such as that but can also prevent anything bad from happening until its fixed.
Not sure why Ubuntu left the old version.
Posted from a 4 or 5 year old Gentoo install. :)
Updates are smooth.
Re:Linux Story (Score:5, Informative)
Any files in /usr/local were provided by you, not Ubuntu. I have apache2 installed here on my Ubuntu box, and my /usr/local/lib directory is empty. Debian policy (which Ubuntu is based on) reserves /usr/local 100% for the local admin, and forbids packages from putting anything in that hierarchy except empty directories. (See section 9.1.2 [debian.org].)
Or to put it another way, no, /usr/local/libz.so.1.2.3.3 is not the "right" one. It's another wrong one that happens to be working for you. For now. The right one is /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.3.3. Next time you upgrade, that /usr/local version is going to bite you in the ass again.
Ubuntu can do a fine job of updating itself, but it's hardly going to be able to upgrade 3rd-party software you installed manually, now, is it?
(Windows is a different case, of course, since Windows doesn't come with any useful software in the first place.) :)
Parent
Drivers/embedded (Score:4, Informative)
There are more drivers because embedded hardware needs drivers to run hardware. You need a driver for your i2c bus. You need a driver to control that LCD panel on your linux-based PDA device. It's like comparing apples with oranges. Windows simply hasn't penetrated into the embedded market like Linux has.
I still don't have Linux support for my creative express card sound device and it is supported on windows.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just a dumb user . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
A while ago I was helping somebody get some software running and printing under Windows, and . . . gawd! . . . they had to install a driver. It's been a couple of years since I had to do anything so primitive. Everything just works.
That's when it finally dawned on me that the times they are a'changin.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hehheh, yeah it's not easy to go back to the old ways. Fixing such issues on Windows, you immediately miss sudo, tail -f /var/log/messages, lsmod, et cetera.
too much back patting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He lies! (Score:5, Informative)
Drivers do get dropped, usually when they're old enough that no kernel developer actually has access to the hardware, and nobody has submitted patches for years.
Drivers can also be added back in if someone feels like cleaning it up and making it work with a new kernel.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because no (active) kernel developer has the hardware does not mean there are no users with that hardware. I've seen drivers removed from the kernel for lack of a maintainer while they were still fully functional -- "ugly code" doesn't matter if it works and people depend on it. Every time a driver is removed, there are end users who complain about it.
Re:About as original as celebrity baby names (Score:4, Funny)
You look lost - don't be afraid to ask for directions. I think the patent story is two blocks that way...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"the MinTV Digital Tuner Card I bought yesterday which the salesman *assured* me ran Linux, but actually didn't."
First mistake, trusting a salesman!
I always buy online after searching for information and reviews. I don't trust salesman to know shit or tell the truth.
Re:Linux is on more devices than any other OS... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent