Hardware Manufacturers that Actively Support Linux?

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!

[samjam]

Canon don't yet, I was very annoued with my facncy new cheap 650 USB scanner!

They are still "thinking about it" and won't give out any specs in the meantime.

Intel

[swagr]

My Compaq Evo n600c laptop had an eepro100 that wasn't supported by the kernel until 2.4.18.

Intel had a src download driver that compiled and worked flawlessly.

nvidia, but...

[Dead_Smiley]

they are not Open Source. I guess this is the obvious one to many... mode me down if you wish.

ATI

[CynicTheHedgehog]

ATI gets a lot of bad press for their drivers, but they do release the specifications for their hardware to multiple open source development groups. What you end up with is Free, open drivers that are as good as the groups that make them. This as opposed to NVidia, a company that although support Linux through binary drivers, does not release the source code or specifications.

Siemens and Fujitsu-Siemens

[dam]

They develdoped stuff for BIOS power management, specific motherboard chip related things (cpu fan speed or stuff like that) and apparently the 4 Gig patch for the Kernel.

Matrox?

[alexandre]

Well, matrox seems to have been quite nice with their GXX0 séries... (dual screen lib i think etc..)

Note:

[Telastyn]

That just because they were community developed, doesn't mean the company didn't give out specs and info to facilatate the community's work.

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)

Matrox and Nvidia

[mrfuzzee]

Matrox has the new drivers out for Xfree86 which work well, and a hell of a lot better then AcceleratedX. Nvidia also has drivers for Xfree86, and just kicks butt. I have been happy with both, They are relatively easy to install and configure.

Creative Labs

[Kaypro]

I believe Creative has a dedicated site for the continued development of their sound card drivers. They even have a CVS up as well.

http://opensource.creative.com/

Cheers!

Nvidia...

[ishark]

Bad as it may sound, since they don't provide the source to their drivers, they seem to work seriously in improving them. I've been using them since my old TNT2 card, and the big problems present at the beginning have faded away to give place to a full featured, fast and reliable thing. I've also had answers to my mails reporting problems, which is always nice.

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....

3ware

[wiwo]

3ware actively supports Linux as there a linux drivers on the CD you get with their RAID-Cards. Works fine, at least with SuSE 7.2+

Matrox

[shaldannon]

Matrox is actively supporting its line of dual-head cards under Linux and various flavors of Windows. There may also be *bsd support as well, but not being a bsd user, I didn't pay attention. I'm running a Matrox G450 under Red Hat 7.2 (upgraded from 7.1) with two ViewSonic E771 17" by .26 monitors in merged display mode and it is phenomenal. I had to use their tech support list to get it working, but it only took a few days...mostly because I'd ask the question from work, try the solution at home, and then follow up at work. See the screen shot [house.cx] (2560x1024 .jpg image, 10485992 bytes).

Compaq

[BayStealth]

I am in the process of bringing our brand new network on-line (8 new DL-360s) and Compaq has been extreamly helpful. All of the servers are running RH 7.2 (they were delivered with 7.1 installed) and we have run into several issues reguarding RAID, the LightsOut boards, etc. Compaq support for their hardware and software has been excellent. Not to mention several cool software things that came with the servers.

For USB scanners: Epson

[Basje]

According to the sane USB page they release even preliminary specs on demand: http://www.buzzard.org.uk/jonathan/scanners-usb.ht ml [buzzard.org.uk].

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 :) (which I shall not name here)

Many do..

[psavo]

• 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.

3ware...

[MonkeyBot]

I have several 3ware raid cards that have worked great. Not only that, but I've had to call several times for support, and every time, I either talked to someone who helped me right off the bat, or was contacted by someone who knew what they were talking about within the day. Twice, they even made driver fixes on the fly and sent me the updated code the next day. DEFINITELY the best company-based Linux support I have seen...

hit and miss...

[laserjet]

Linux support is kind of hit and miss right now with larger companies. For instance, HP is adding more linux support than ever to their printers, even the office jets, but if you go buy a scanner, they don't support it. Obviously, the community supports a lot of HP scanners, but not the company. [hp.com]

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.)

DLink and a noname laptop

[NETHED]

DLink has pretty good support, especially for Linux. My dad's noname laptop came with a CD that provided Linux drivers, and they actively support them via the phone support.

Re:Not yet!

[rafelbev]

This also applies to their printers. They are the most supported... much more than HP does. Epson printers simply ROCK regarding linux support. My Stylus never gave me problems and I know alot of people who can say the same. They guys who import them in my country support our LUG too.

Just my 2c

Rej

Gigabyte has been good to me.

[SwellJoe]

I don't know if it is universally the practice at Gigabyte, but the networking server group there have been great. They've always made sure up-to-date drivers shipped with everything I've gotten from them. Some of their boards ship with Promise ataraid controllers, and while they couldn't get me the docs they tell me the techs there have been campaigning Promise to be more forthcoming (and they do provide binary drivers for those controllers--I don't use them, but they are there and Gigabyte actually apologized for not having source drivers available).

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 !

[forged]

Pick one source from the following list, in no particular order:

RedHat Hardware Channels
http://www.redhat.com/marketplace/channel_hardware . tml [redhat.com]
(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]

Re:database or directory of peripherals?

[GreyPoopon]

For a list of vendors that offer Linux drivers, you can try Linux.org's hardware vendor list [linux.org]. I don't know how frequently it is updated. For information on compatibility, you can try the Linux Hardware Database [datapower.com]. It provides all kinds of information on what works and how well, where to find drivers, workarounds for problems and general user ratings and comments.

BusLogic (Mylex)

[MoNsTeR]

Do they still exist?
Anyway, I remember they wrote all their own linux drivers for their scsi cards...

Watch for drivers being GPL, but not in kernel

[Yohahn]

With the advent of hotplug, and firmware uploading, there are going to be lots of firms offering support for linux, but it won't be included with the kernel.

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.

Re:The general ruel

[gmack]

Uhh no

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.

Wireless cards

[xiaix]

When I went looking for wireless cards for my Vaio running linux, I found as the author did that most of the 'support' for linux means 'some one figured it out'. Although this is part of the beauty of being a linux user, sometimes you want to know that the hardware manufacturer actually knows you are out there and cares enogh to support you. In the end I wound up buying a Cisco Aironet 350 card ($125 bux at computers4sure.com) [computers4sure.com], which came with linux drivers, software, and install instructions.

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.

Re:database or directory of peripherals?

[CrazyDwarf]

The most recent one is located Here [tldp.org]. It was updated just last month. It looks like linuxdoc.org is changing their url, that's why it shows up now as tldp.org.

Adaptec, Belkin and !Creative

[entrigant]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it but Adaptec has done a very fine job supporting linux. I am not sure how many if any of the drivers they actually wrote but they have a really well designed web site to help linux and *BSD users setup and use a lot of their equipment. They also provide utility software for their hardware. For example I am running Adaptec Storage Manager right now on a linux system with an Adaptec 2400a raid card.

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.

Re:ATI

[CynicTheHedgehog]

while ATI just says "here...good luck"

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.

Lexmark puts a Penguin on their Boxes

[Holesome]

I just bought a cheap, er, inexpensive Lexmark laser printer. It touted Linux support and even had a Penguin on the box and linux drivers on the installation CD. Unfortunately it still took a bit of fiddling to get the printer to work but work it does. Can't say to what extent they actively contributed versus used other peoples work however.

UMAX

[ninewands]

The problem with UMAX CSCI scanners is the crapware semi-SCSI interface card they provide with them. Replace the card with an Adaptec, or some other supported REAL SCSI host adapter and you will find that the UMAX scanners are very nicely supported by SANE.

Re:database or directory of peripherals?

[Papineau]

The problem is that usually kernel drivers are for a chip, not for a product. A few examples:

• 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:nvidia, but...

[(startx)]

IMHO, nividia is awesome. I don't care who has issues with the license of their drivers, at least they work. Not only that, but I get higher framerates in slackware than I do in windoze 98. As long as the nvidia binaries remain rock solid and work out of the box, I really don't care if I have the source or not.

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.

Re:nvidia, but...

[defile]

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:database or directory of peripherals?

[Erik Hensema]

SuSE [suse.com] has such a database [hardwaredb.suse.de]. It isn't very SuSE specific though.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

NVIDIA actively support Linux by constantly releasing up to date drivers that are very high quality. The NVIDIA drivers are unquestionably the highest quality OpenGL implementation available on Linux without exception. ATI supply the specs but apart from that do almost nothing, they have enough trouble supporting high quality Windows drivers. The reason you need the specs is to get any kind of driver support at all, when the manufacturer is delivering full high quality up to date drivers with more OpenGL support and extension support and quality than anyone else I'd rather have that than specs and a driver development effort that can't keep up. OpenGL is not like most other driver efforts, there is a level of complexity and testing required which seems to require more support and maintenance and a higher level of expertise to get high quality than is currently applied to them by the Open Source community. I'm disappointed by people who constantly feel the need to dis NVIDIA when they do more to support Linux than any other hardware vendor, simply because the way they choose to support Linux doesn't match your philosophy.

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:Unless it's bleeding edge

[CJ Hooknose]

About the only cheap things I can think of that won't are WinModems and CD writers.

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:Matrox? - not at all!

[dusty123]

I recently bought the G550. Nice card for a Linux workstation without the need for high performance 3D applications.

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.

Re:ATI

[psamuels]

Actually, you can get the sourc for the nVidia drivers for the purpose of compiling it for your own machine. You're just not supposed to read it.

Have you looked closely? Last I remember, you got the source for a small part of the drivers for the purpose of compiling on your own machine. The deep magic still happened in the *.o file(s) you got no source for. The driver source you got was just a shim layer to make sure the Real Driver could work correctly with your current Linux kernel.

Has this changed?

NDAs, DMCA, etc..

[Mike Hicks]

I think there are a lot of companies that would like to do better, but can't due to non-disclosure agreements of one kind or another. Video card vendors like Matrox and ATI can't give out all of the information on their cards due to Macrovision support on TV-output ports.

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..

Re:ATI

[Fluffy the Cat]

NVidia activey supports linux

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

[Hamshrew]

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.

ZERO points for Logitech...

[Anonymous Coward]

Logitech has provided little support for Linux and is especially bad for their lack of cooperation with webcam drivers. It's strange that a hardware company should keep its product interface specs so secret. After all, if a company wants to sell more hardware, isn't it in their best interest to publish those specs?

Great ones:

[Kether]

Syskonnect - Makes some of the best network cards, and developes very, very stable drivers for linux. Best of Breed.

ICP-Vortex - Makes some of the best RAID cards available. Develops their own drivers. Best of Breed again.

Cyclades - makes some nice stuff, supports linux well.

Adaptec may have gotten better, but they didnt used to release the source for their RAID cards, and only realeased binary drivers for certain kernels, and didnt update them often.

Mylex used to advertize heavy about working with linux, but relied upon community drivers, even linking to the community page. Why woudlnt they bring this person on-board to fully support linux?
Makes no sence to me. Why buy Mylex when i can have a much better card in ICP-Vortex anyway?

NOT KODAK

[cowbird]

Kodak is one of the real losers when it comes to releasing specs. Scratch them from the list, and add them to your blacklist.

The Role of Hardware Design

[Chris Tyler]

Beside releasing specs, the other thing that the hardware companies can do is support standards and engineer their products so that there is less variation between product generations.

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

Re:ATI

[ivan256]

There are two types of stories you hear about nvidia drivers. (I speak as someone who has three machines running nvidia cards)

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...

EDT

[spagthorpe]

The guys at EDT (www.edt.com) who make all sorts of data acquisition and control cards, support Linux very well. I've used their LVDS cards for a handful of projects, and they are very knowledgeable and helpful with Linux. They have native drivers for the cards, sample code, etc. Highly recommended. I have no connection with them other than being a very satisfied customer.

Linksys cards considered harmful

[steveha]

I am afraid of Linksys cards. Very afraid.

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:ATI

[Paul Komarek]

Are the NVidia drivers really the highest quality, without question? What about FireGL, and other "professional" cards? I expect the highest-quality OpenGL implementations for linux happen on cards with more precision than any of the consumer cards offer (though the Kyro II has more internal precision than most). NVidia's binary-only drivers are probably pretty good for gaming, for those people who don't mind "tainting" their kernel.

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

3ware

[Paul Johnson]

They write and then open-source their Linux drivers.

I haven't actually used their IDE-RAID cards, but everyone I've heard from speaks very highly of them.

Paul.