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?"

Comments

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.

Re:Not yet!

[volsung]

Note to people looking for USB scanners: Epson has apparently been nice to the developers. From the SANE USB scanner list:

Epson have[sic] been very helpful with the development of the backend, to the point of providing documentation that's not yet released.

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

Re:Not yet!

[prizog]

"Epson have[sic] ..."

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).

Re:Not yet!

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

This also applies to their printers.

Don't forget about Lexmark.

I have a Z-52 hooked up to my Linux box at home. Works great! And Lexmark does have Native Linux drivers out for their printers. At least mine, anyway. I can't speak for other models. Tey come in RPM form, so if you're not on a RPM based Distro, Alien should be your friend (I'm on MDK so that is untested...).

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

In America a company is a singular person before the eyes of the law.
Does that help explain it?

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Canon don't yet. = Canon do not yet.(Which is bad grammar!)

Syntatic Error. Assignment to a non left hand value.

TRY:
Canon don't yet. == Canon do not yet.(Which is bad grammar!)

:)

Thanx though for not being the idiot who rails on non-english speakers about their english. Back in the late 80's, the 'net was a more forgiving place devoted more to ideas and less to some of this insane trolling action

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

sic is applicable - it means "thus"...Although it has the connotation that the terms it applies to were incorrectly stated, you can put it in anywhere in a quote and so long as you are quoting accurately it will apply.

"This [sic] is [sic] an [sic] example [sic]."

:)

Re:Not yet!

[Mysticalfruit]

For support for HP printers, check out gimp print. From what I've seen its pretty damn amazing.

Re:Not yet!

[prizog]

sic means "thus" in Latin. In English, it means "the person I'm quoting fucked up." Nobody uses it any other way, and usage determines meaning.

Re:Not yet!

[bulbul]

You are correct about the usage, but it goes beyond companies. For example, British "The audience are listening" and American "the audience is listening". Plural agreement is marginally acceptable in American English with "family": "the family are all gathered together".

What is interesting is that this type of agreement is never possible, even in British English, in a "there" construction. So, although with a true plural noun, the normal agreement is plural, as in "there are thirty attendees in the room", to use the analogous plural form with "audience" is impossible, "*there are an audience in the room".

As for switching from a singular noun to a plural pronoun ("IBM is the leader... They have just..."), speakers do the same with impersonal "they". Note the switch from singular "someone" to plural "them": "If you love someone, set them free." (I use a British lyric as an example so people don't protest that only Americans do this.)

Leston Buell
Department of Linguistics
UCLA

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

And this applies to the discussion at hand how?

Re:Not yet!

[prizog]

That's precisely why I want to switch to British style here. Anyway, American still allows inconsistency ("IBM has ...; they have ..."). Just about everywhere, companies are singular entities, whether or not they are people. Anyway, if companies are people in America, why don't we say "IBM is the largest consulting company; he is also the best"? Nobody ever refers to a person as "it". Even cats and dogs generally get a he or she (even when actual sex is unknown). But not corporations.

But we are now way off-topic. ObOnTopic: Intel has been improving lately on Free Software stuff.

Re:Not yet!

[pmz]

(I don't like the idea of companies as entities comparable to individuals -- it removes responsibility and encourages unethical behavior)

In the U.S., my incentive to incorporate my business is to insulate myself and my assets from my business and its assets. This is an important legal protection. I'm not really convinced it encourages unethical behavior; rather, it encourages people to take on greater risks, which are very important in growing innovative businesses.

Some people may try to use this mechanism to mask accountability, but it really doesn't work in the long run. Healthy businesses have to maintain accountability to stay strong, since a business is fundamentally a group of people working together.

Re:Not yet!

[Wizy]

We all know IBM is supporting linux any way it can. And everyone should know by now that Lexmark == IBM. So, it should go without saying that lexmark printers should have great linux support.

Re:Not yet!

[Tralfamadorian]

English has a language has evolved for quite some time, and it's rules aren't exactly the clearest things in the world, but I have just now made a new rule (which is not much more crazy than some of the others):

A proper noun which represents a group of people is treated as singular (like "sand"), but when referred to with a pronoun the plural is used (they). This is because we don't have any pronouns which are plural in meaning but singular in form.

There you go, no more inconsistancy! A better solution might be to add a new pronoun, something like "thes," or "yem" maybe. That way, we can be consistant in our use of nouns which are singular in form but plural in meaning. Though, I can see a company being both plural and singular, like any other group of people.

"My LUG is full of great people, they propably know more about linux than anybody!"

or using my new pronoun:

"My LUG is full of great people, thes propably know more about linux than anybody!"

Re:Not yet!

[tit4tat]

American usage does NOT allow inconsistency. Your example ("IBM has ...; they have ...") is gramatically incorrect in America and any other English-speaking country. Just because some people talk or write inconsistently doesn't make it gramatically correct. Even William Safire (or his editor, if he has one) makes mistakes.

In addition, it is untrue that "companies are people in America." Companies, corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, trusts, banks, charities, fraternal organizations, etc. are fictitious entities that have been accorded legal standing, first by judges, then by statutes. IBM is not a person, it is a thing. Unlike cats and dogs, which are also not people, IBM does not have a gender or a sex.

Although it does not address this particular topic, you might want to refer to Strunk's The Elements of Style.
__________
You couldn't give them away around here. -- Kurt Heasley

Re:Not yet!

[Talonius]

Heh, it applies to every discussion on Slashdot because 99% of the users and readers here need a good English lesson.

:P

Re:Not yet!

[Zaknafein500]

Because in English we have 3 options for sex, male, female, and unspecified. It's not like Spanish where everything takes on a gender. A company is obviously neither male, nor female, so you refer to it as "it".

Re:Not yet!

[raddan]

Actually, the genesis of the idea of the corporation in the US and Europe are different, hence the differing grammatic construction.

The U.S. corporation was essentially created via precedent set in the case U.S. v. Dartmouth College. In the U.S., corporations have "legal personhood", thus American English has adapted to this legal construction (singular).

The Continental construction of the corporation, however, stems from the German "gesellschaft", or "society". Most European law has embraced the idea of a corporation as a collection of individuals (a company) instead of the American legal construction which thinks of it as a single entity. Thus Eurpeans tend to refer to corporations in the plural.

Dewey writes some interesting things about this distinction, and I would tell you where you can find the essay, but I can't recall the name of it at the moment...

Re:Not yet!

[WhiteKnight07]

I think the point he was trying to make was that under US law a corporation is considered to be equal to an individual for legal purposes even though a corporation isn't actually a person.

Re:Not yet!

[Drachemorder]

Interesting. I haven't been able to get my Z42 working in Linux yet, although I admittedly haven't tried very hard.

Re:Not yet!

[Newander]

Bull, just look at Ken Lay and his "homestead".

Re:Not yet!

[LinuxGeek8]

Besides Epson, I believe Umax did release the specs of their scanners also.
And Mustek (or was it Plustek?) developed some drivers for their scanners.

Re:Not yet!

[bitweever]

"My LUG is full of great people, thes propably know more about linux than anybody!"

The rest of the country is sooo behind. I'm from Oklahoma, and we've been using 'thes' for years. We prefer the alternate spelling, "they's". Also try "them's", they can be used almost interchangeably:
They's good people.
Them's good people.

Next thing you know, the rest of the country will catch on to to the second person plural pronoun, "ya'll".

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, may be you should retake your Spanish classes then...
What about this?

El hombre (male)
La mujer (female)
Lo bueno (neutral)

Re:Not yet!

[prizog]

Your example ("IBM has ...; they have ...") is gramatically incorrect in America and any other English-speaking country.

Grammar is determined by usage. I tried has/have (well, more or less) on IRC, and asked if anybody wanted to complain; nobody did. Certainly, if you google around, you will find lots of people mixi
ng the singular and plural that way, even columnists. (random examples:
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16270.html
http://www.forbes.com/2001/01/10/0110ibm.html
ht tp://www-1.ibm.com/services/innovation/abercromb ie.shtml
-- search for "they have". Unfortunately, I can't find a Safire example).

Wait, I'm an idiot. They is grammatically a plural but semantically a neuter singular! So, it's not inconsistent at all. And it just happens to work out to the same text in British English, but without the nonstandard semantics on "they". Neat!

Although it does not address this particular topic, you might want to refer to A Person Paper On Purity In Language.

In addition, it is untrue that "companies are people in America."

In a legal sense, it is quite true -- see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. for details.

...are fictitious entities

Corporations are far from fictitious -- they're as real as political parties, house parties, or dirt. Should corporations exist? In their current form? With their current rights and privileges? Off-topic in the extreme. But corporations are as real as you or I, if not as human.

Re:Not yet!

[natet]

That suprises me. For the longest time I have been unable to use my Astra 1220P because Umax refused to release the spec and wouldn't produce a Win2k driver. It looks like it is supported in the latest version of sane though... That makes me happy.

Re:Not yet!

[charon_on_acheron]

Actually, there is one instance where it is perfectly acceptaple to refer to a person as "it". If someone has a baby, the most common question is, "Is it a boy or a girl?" Even if you meet someone with a baby while at the mall, and you can't tell if the baby is a boy or a girl, the same question can be asked.

And as far as cats and dogs, many people generally get the sex wrong most of the time, even if they have been told repeatedly which sex the animal is. I always refer to each of my friends cats as "she", even though I know at least one is a male. I just don't care enough to remember which one is which. But then again, it would seem silly refering to one of them as an "it".

Re:Not yet!

[LinuxGeek8]

Maybe Umax released just the specs for the scsi models.
I am not sure about that.
But yes, support for parport and usb Umax's are rather new.

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

...and my 670 USB scanner!

Re:Not yet!

[big_hairy_mama]

It sounds like your printer works fine, but Lexmark has *not* been kind to Linux with its other models. Fortunately, my model (the 3200) was reverse engineered, but certainly not with Lexmark's support. Some other models have also been so fortunate as to be reverse engineered by some intelligent Linux developer, but Lexmark in general will give you nothing but hell. The 3200 driver isn't even maintained anymore, so good luck with that.

My Lexmark has been a good and reliable printer, but I would *not* recommend it to someone looking for a Linux printer. Go with Epson or HP, as earlier posts have pointed out. Better yet, get a Postscript printer like the old days :)

Re:Not yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an American who is trying to switch to the British convention for obscure political reasons

Its fags like you who are the problem. Why don't you just get the fuck out of the country. It would solve both of our problems.

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.

Re:Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

eepro has been supported by the kernel for a very very long time, but the intel drivers have always been better.

Re:Intel

[swagr]

Yes BUT, the kernel would fail to recognize that it could support my particular card, and hence would not. This made the kernel's "support" completely useless in my case.

Re:Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

I am looking for info on the 802.11b Wireless Card.

Re:Intel

[ImaLamer]

The question was... "What is actively supported"

Not what isn't.

Re:Intel

[shiva]

My eepro100 in my Sony Vaio worked just dandy as a module from 2.2 and on.

Re:Intel

[DragonWyatt]

I just got it working.

Check here to see how.

Re:Intel

[DragonWyatt]

For commentary (and a sort of How-To) on my interacting with both Compaq *and* Intel on trying to get the multiport wireless option to work under Linux, check here.

Summary: Neither Intel or Compaq could/would help me, even discouraged me by telling me it couldn't be done. But, with a nice set of tools from these guys, I got it to work, and was even able to contribute to the project so that this device would be supported in the future.

Oh yeah. I also CC'ed Compaq and Intel's technical support ;) .

By the way, the builtin eepro100 was supported well by rh7.2's stock kernel, FYI (proof that integrators and distro maintainers are valuable methinks).

Re:Intel

[Merlin_]

I agree with the statement about integrators being valuable. RedHat 7.2 includes support for the screen dimming functionality for the Sony VAIO line of portables stock. It was a nice surprise... I got scared when I did a google search on the subject and though I had to do it myself :-|`

Re:Intel

[devaldez]

You should check out the 2.5.6 and following kernels. Not only is Intel supporting the community, they have their own Ethernet drivers in the 2.5 kernel! Moreover, they are working hard with Garzik et al to enhance the networking stack in Linux in order to have native support for things like VLANs and TCP Segmentation Offload.

Re:Intel

[Dwonis]

Do an lspci -vv (or something like that) and send the results to the driver's maintainer. It's probably a 1- or 2-line patch.

Re:Intel

[Advocadus Diaboli]

Yes BUT, the kernel would fail to recognize that it could support my particular card

Looks like you are a victim of a common problem that appears when PC manufacturers put things like an Intel LAN chip on board. Here in my company (a big PC factory in Europe) I see this problems too from time to time.

The reason is that the LAN chip is practically the same that you will find on an Intel EEPRO100 but it identifies with a different vendor-ID, probably the vendor ID of the manufacturer that made your PC.

Since the drivers check if the hardware is "what they know" you will find out, that your special vendor ID (or even subvendor ID, device ID) won't fit for that. So check what PCI-IDs you see on your bus and then add the "unknown" ID to the driver. Just use the source Luke :-)

I've "fixed" a lot of problems like that, also "not supported" new chips from Intel (like 82562) that is downward compatible with the supported 82559.

Re:Intel

[swagr]

It's already been fixed. As of 2.4.18.

Re:Intel

[swagr]

Your comment is very insightful. Thanks. I'd mod you up if I could.

nvidia, but...

[Dead_Smiley]

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

Re:nvidia, but...

[knewman_1971]

Call me crazy, or mod me as flamebait, but...

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...

[Dead_Smiley]

Nah, I don't think you are crazy. I just want the freakig thing to work, just like you.

There was a time when I didn't mind dinking with things for days on end just to see if I could make it work. Now I don't have time...

Re:nvidia, but...

[fizz-beyond]

Frankly I'm with you, there are alot of people here on /. that would stone you if they were given the chance because you didn't release something opensource, and quite frankly I think it's too extreme.

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...

[theMissingLink]

A note on the Intel Pocket Concert MP3 player:

Using SuSE 7.3 and downloading the standalone usb library I was able to get the 0.5 release example programs from Sourceforge working. Note that all this work has been done reverse engineering from the USB stream.

I'm not happy with Intel. This is a discontinued product and they still will not release anything about this device. Get a clue, Intel!

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:nvidia, but...

[Onetime77]

confused about nvidia not being open source They have driver sorce for download..... http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=linux

Re:nvidia, but...

[fizz-beyond]

Just for my own knowlege could you explain how binary drivers are inferior? the ONLY part of it I see as being inferior is that it can not be recompiled by the end user for whatever reason (be it optimization for hardware or whatnot)

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

that's not the full soucre.
You're just compliliing certain bindings to your system... or something.

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The GLX package is fully binary, containing the OpenGL, GLX and XFree86 drivers. The kernel driver package containes a binary with a wrapper, so that one can compile it for any kernel. (Aside from 2.5 since it doesn't work with that).

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Just for my own knowlege could you explain how binary drivers are inferior? the ONLY part of it I see as being inferior is that it can not be recompiled by the end user for whatever reason (be it optimization for hardware or whatnot)

That "only" part of your query is the most important part. Imagine you have a hardware device, it works pretty well (but not perfectly). No one but the vendor can make any fixes to the device driver. If the vendor discontinues work on that product in favor of a newer model, your existing driver/hardware combo will never work better than it does at the time the vendor stops supporting it. A source-based driver can keep improving over the life of its hardware, which is always longer than the vendor's desired product lifetime ;-).

If you're using a Linux system, the Linux kernel hackers have a policy of being able to change the driver interfaces in the kernel sources when necessary, ie, when it benefits the design or performance of the kernel to do so. They deliberately don't want to be constrained to have to maintain binary compatibility with older kernel versions. If the afore mentioned hardware vendor orphans your device, and the kernel developers change the API for your device, it won't work under the new kernel. You have to change your hardware or use patches to the older kernel version to keep up with bug fixes or new kernel features.

Linux drivers are intended to be source files, not binaries, to avoid these maintenance issues. Source drivers are preferable to a binary-only driver for these reasons.

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using a Linux system, the Linux kernel hackers have a policy of being able to change the driver interfaces in the kernel sources when necessary, ie, when it benefits the design or performance of the kernel to do so. They deliberately don't want to be constrained to have to maintain binary compatibility with older kernel versions. If the afore mentioned hardware vendor orphans your device, and the kernel developers change the API for your device, it won't work under the new kernel. You have to change your hardware or use patches to the older kernel version to keep up with bug fixes or new kernel features.

All of that is a nice reason against binary drivers in general, but when talking specifically about nVidia, you have everything from the TNT to the GeForce4Ti card covered under 1 unified driver, so unless you're using an even older nVidia card, they'll continue to be supported as long as nVidia's keeping the driver's interface up to date for their latest card.

The main issue with nVidia drivers is whether or not their unified drivers support their older cards as well as they should over time. TNT and TNT2 cards were believed to not perform as well with drivers optimized for GeForce cards, for instance, but at the same time GeForce3 cards got some new features when the GF3Ti cards were released (because the features were always in the hardware, but not supported in the driver).

Then again, a creative person could always come along and map the old kernel API onto the new one for that specific device, if possible. Shit happens, but it's always better than having binary drivers on a binary OS with very little information on how the two interact and/or what broke compatibility.

Re:nvidia, but...

[vidarh]

No they have not. Try actually looking in the archives next time.

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pocketconcert/

Was updated at the start of this month. Works for me. they also have the protocol spec, so you know what you can do...

Re:nvidia, but...

[knewman_1971]

Thanks for the info...

I've given up entirely on the Intel. The wife runs XP and loves the player, so I took her Rio500 and added a 128M memory card.

Shrug. It works. But sexy it ain't.

Re:nvidia, but...

[Eric Smith]

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.

If that was really true (which I doubt), nVidia could release the sources with the third-party code stripped, and the community would write a replacement for that part.

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...

[Ogerman]

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.

If you're a gamer junkie, then fine. For those of us whose computers are more than just toys, NVidia's unstable closed drivers are not even a consideration. And maybe you'll reconsider as well someday when X crashes while running a GL accelerated app. Closed source drivers are 100% illogical and unacceptable under any circumstance. That's all there is to it.

Re:nvidia, but...

[knewman_1971]

Perhaps I should have thrown in more hardware horror stories...

* Digital Capture Device (w/USB)
* My USB scanner.
* Any of my inkjet printers.
* The freakin' southbridge on my mobo.
* Every webcam I've ever tried, with the exception of my Creative Labs cam


...trust me, the list goes on. My computer is a toy, from time to time. But most of the time, it's coding, designing, capturing, or something less-than-entertaining.

I'll concede that if nVidia drivers caused my system to crash, I'd be the first to chunk the card and drivers, and go looking for an alternative. But, I've run Mandrake, RedHat, and Suse (various versions) on the four cards I've owned, and I can tell you that MY only complaint is the splash screen. Which can be turned off.

But, back at the point, even if I went shopping for a new video card, my argument remains the same. I'm not going to quibble about the source code. If it's open and available, great. If not, and it somehow manages to work despite that, great.

From my perspective, as an end user, even if the source WAS available, I couldn't do a damn thing with it anyway. Nor do I know anyone who could. Sure, the "community" could probably pull a rabbit out of it's collective ass and build one. But how long do I have to wait? It's not my fault I'm not a device driver programmer.

Don't get me wrong. At the end of the day, I think open source is a great idea. I'd love for all drivers and software to come with clean, well documented code. But it doesn't. I'd also love to have a group of highly skilled developers on staff who did nothing but write device drivers for hardware that I own, or would like to own. But again, I don't.

So what's the alternative? Do I have to accept the fact that wanting to run linux precludes me from running the latest hardware?

Sadly, the answer is yes, in lots of cases.

For me, the answer is clear. I'm going to give as much business as possible to vendors who are kind enough to throw a bone our way occasionally, as opposed to beating them up for not coming all the way. More power to you if you choose to do it another way.

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I kinda got mine working, but it kept failing. You often have to reconnect the thing after doing EVERY command.

Have you had any better luck?

Re:nvidia, but...

[Arandir]

From my perspective, as an end user, even if the source WAS available, I couldn't do a damn thing with it anyway.

No, but someone else could. That makes all the difference in the world.

Re:nvidia, but...

[DennisZeMenace]

> And maybe you'll reconsider as well someday when X crashes while running a GL accelerated app. Closed source drivers are 100% illogical and unacceptable under any circumstance. That's all there is to it.

Maybe this is because the Linux kernel device driver framework is so poorly done and un-standardized than you NEED the driver source code to do anything. That certainly is not nVidia's fault or problem...

DZM

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad their linux drivers are crap.

They constantly crash if you try to run multiple X sessions, which I must.

Long Live Matrox.

Re:nvidia, but...

[0x0d0a]

Not only does Matrox do the open source thing, but their cards are have *better* driver support.

I'm happily using the mga_vid x11 interface to mplayer decoding right into video memory. Faster than the xv driver, even. Divxes at full frame rate on my old computer. Mmm...

Carmack was one of the people working on the Matrox GLX driver for XFree86 3. :-)

Re:nvidia, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't have any need for frame rates above 72 Hz."

That's because the human eye cannot see more than 72 frames per second anyhow.

Re:nvidia, but...

[Derek]

"It's not my fault I'm not a device driver programmer."

Ummmmm, actually it is. ;-)

-Derek

Re:nvidia, but...

[Ogerman]

Maybe this is because the Linux kernel device driver framework is so poorly done and un-standardized than you NEED the driver source code to do anything.

Maybe you don't have a clue what you're talking about and have never even looked at the kernel source. Some drivers are better written than others, but the framework is remarkably solid.

Re:nvidia, but...

[the_greywolf]

their drivers are distributed in source form (.tar.gz and .src.rpm) as well as binary form for various distros. IIRC, there aren't any binary files in the source packages, but i might have overlooked a .o file somewhere. for the most part, the source is "open", just not "open-source".

Re:nvidia, but...

[NorthDude]

IIRC, I've read somewhere that they supply their driver only in a binary form and they supply an open source "Wrapper" around it.

Re:Read this technocrat scum!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonehead replied to wrong story... he he he

Sun Microsystems

[Anonymous Coward]

They've really cooperated with the Linux community. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been Linux on SPARC at all.

Posted anonymously for karma rationing.

Re:Sun Microsystems

[h8sg8s]

Yes - actually the Cobalt line has quite a bit of vendor-developed content. Sure will be interesting how this changes when they move into the general Linux server market as opposed to their current appliance products.

Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

"What do you mean you want to run an OS other than windows? There are operating systems other than Windows? Do you mean DOS? No, we don't support DOS." -- Typical hardware manufacturer

Re:Typical response

[swagr]

This happened to me during an ADSL support call. They switched their DNSs and I wanted to know the new ones.

"..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

[smallblackdog]

lmmfao that is so fucking funny. I've just spent about 10 minutes on the floor in pain from laughing too much. HAHAHAHAH mod the parent up more. So true. hhahahahahahahahahhahahah

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

>"Can I have them."
What's to bet the tech replied "can you hold while I talk to my supervisor".

Re:Typical response

[digitalsushi]

I asked for these from a girl at college a couple years ago, the day we were moving in, and she went balistic on me and told me to get my own. She was CS, too.. sad..

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. Run your own DNS servers. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO.html

Re:Typical response

[Mysticalfruit]

The solution to the problem is "whois". I called up verizon (yes I know...) and asked for their DNS numbers and I was told that they don't give those out for security reasons. I almost had to put the phone down I was laughing so hard. I asked the person if I could talk to their supervisor, who gave me the same answer. "Unless your using our PPPoE client we will not support or give aid to any non standard setup." I was polite and simply said that all I wanted was the DNS addresses and that I was more than capable of supporting myself. No go, finally I just thank you and hung up on them. Dialed in to the company and did a whois and then put in those DNS settings. Yeah, its been my experience that 99.9999999 percent of the techsupport from verizon could be best described as worker drones...

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah wow... I can't stop laughing either. A person hired to answer telephones who probably makes minimum wage or slightly above wasn't familiar with the concept of someone running an O/S other than what is on over 95% of Desktop Computers in the world. Hard to believe isn't it?

Re:Typical response

[BiggestPOS]

I love these calls, the moment "DNS serv..." comes out of their mouth I start spouting the dotted quads. I know at least 5 of our DNS IPs by heart, but only give out two on a regular basis. Whats truly sad though, is about 75% of the "I just need the DNS servers" people call back and ask me why their connection isn't working. BAH.

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

techsupport from verizon could be best described as worker drones.

Make that unqualified affirmative action minority "people of color" slacker drones.

Re:Typical response

[SailorMeeko]

I've got to give a big thumbs up for Earthlink tech support.

About a year and a half ago when my brother got his cable modem, I helped him setup a Linux server (Red Hat 6.2) + IP Masquerading for his home network. This was fairly straightforward, and required no tech support help, and has run fine ever since.

Well, this weekend he switched to Earthlink DSL. I wanted to make the switch as easy as possible for him, without having to re-install anything. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work as easily as the cable modem had, and so we called Earthlink tech support. After trying to ask for help without revealing which OS we were using, it was becoming quite obvious we couldn't. The person asked what OS we are using, and we told him Red Hat Linux 6.2 We were expecting to hear something like "We're sorry, that is not supported", but instead he told us we need a PPPoE in order to connect. He then told us about a program called Roaring Penguin, and where to go to download it. He then helped us configure it and get us connected. We were both quite impressed.

I also remember a time about 4 or 5 years ago when I had Earthlink dial-up, and I was using something like Red Hat 5.0 or maybe even 4.x Anyway, it was in the earlier days before establishing an Internet connection in Linux was easy (at least for me), and I was having trouble getting connected (editing ppp scripts and such, all from the CL), so just for fun I decided to give Earthlink tech support a call. To my surprise, the person walked me through the editing of the scripts, and they worked perfectly, and I was connected.

Re:Typical response

[Frank of Earth]

You're brave. I would never admit that I run linux as my server through my cable modem. I just fake it when they ask me to do silly stuff like that.

"Run winipcfg"
*runs ifconfig*

Re:Typical response

[3rd_Floo]

I really hate responding to things like this but oh well, mod me down if it upsets you.

At my college here, the Admin is very very anal about things, infact, no outbound DNS query can be made from within the school, except from his DNS server. I can not contact the root DNS servers for anything, infact, I think they are outright blockd on all ports, not just DNS. I cant even query other DNS servers external to the school network. So when I wanted to set up my own DNS server, I was hosed.. This ultimatly wastes my time in having my own DNS server.

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf are you talking about?

Re:Typical response

[KjetilK]

Hehe. Well, the whois isn't kept that up-to-date by all registrars, you know. It can take several months, unless you're on Opensrs...

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

They're. Hired. To. Know. That. Stuff. If you work at an ISP, it's your goddamn job to at least know what Linux, DNS, and IP are.

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a typical CS student to me.

"What? you don't know? RTFM and get out of my face!"

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

They're. Hired. To. Know. That. Stuff. If you work at an ISP, it's your goddamn job to at least know what Linux, DNS, and IP are.

Welcome. to. reality. They. don't. pay. help. desk. people. enough money to get anyone that knows more than the average computer user. And the ones that actually do know what they are doing quickly move on to better paying jobs.

Show me a CCIE who's never heard of Linux... now that would be funny. But the fact that some 17 year old kid who's been brought up on Windows 95/98 and landed a minimum wage job warming seats at an ISP and has never heard of Linux doesn't suprise me one bit.

Re:Typical response

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, gee, I love Slashdot sometimes, because you just gave me a demented idea.

Obviously the Linux/free software community needs a program that looks enough like the Windows TCP/IP control panels to let you BS your way through such a call. Unless you have it memorized from years of working on the real thing, you'd be hard pressed to remember all of the tabs and buttons.

Let's say this program exists and you have to call up your dimwitted ISP. You can refer to a specific tab and ask them what goes in there. They'll never know you're actually faking them out in order to collect the data for your /etc/resolv.conf or whatever.

Note: this program would just be a bunch of dummied-up panels. It wouldn't actually make any changes. The whole point is to give you a way to lie to them convincingly. Bonus points for having various modes (95, 98, NT, XP, etc).

Re:Typical response

[0x0d0a]

I believe you're the one in error here. Running a DNS server doesn't do you a lot of good if it doesn't have a "parent" domain name server to recurse to on lookups that it can't answer.

So if he was running a name server (as I am), he'd still be in the same fix -- he'd need the new DNS IP.

Now, I *do* advocate keeping multiple DNS entries...

Re:Read this technocrat scum!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which was the right story?

ho ho

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.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the whole story! I recently purchased an ATI Radeon 8500DV only to find that the driver only supports 2D acceleration. As I recall after browsing their website, the GATOS project and X11, ATI has no plans to release any 3D info to allow a driver to be written. I'm still hoping, but they DO NOT support the good features (the only reason to buy an expensive card) for X. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love to get a driver, and I went with ATI rather than NVidia because I want free and open drivers. 2D only isn't it.

Re:ATI

[Sabalon]

Oddly enough, as you were trying to say that ATI is a little better than Nvidia (cause of the opensource/binary driver thing), you have said that NVidia activey supports linux - goes out of there way as the question said, while ATI just says "here...good luck".

ATI gets a lot of bad press for their drivers for a damn good reason too :)

Re:ATI

[fdawg]

Say that to my Dual Head ATI Radeon VE. I couldnt find drivers that used half of the card's funtionality that were present in windows. Heh, I was lucky to get a single display to work albeit only on the second monitor with nothing on the first. I have happily switched to Matrox where their drivers are built in house and work rather well aside from the lack of TVcapture/output in linux but that is only a matter of time.

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.

Re:ATI

[EasyTarget]

... Of course, there is an argument that just giving the hardware specs and saying 'good luck' is the open source route..

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

[johnjones]

considering that they EMPLOY people to work on XFREE86 I dont think that they should do anything else

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

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I remember reading somewhere that ATI developers are allowed and I think encouraged to participate in Open Source projects. This is hearsay of course, but it would be nice if it was true.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but my ATI Rage Pro (probably THE most popular chipset) still can't do any 3D acceleration in linux with any of the "free" alternatives--XFree86, DRI, GLX or whatever... So if ATI does release the specs and hardware info to open source development, what the heck is taking so long to get some decent functionality in?

Re:ATI

[Krusher55]

I find it funny that some people would rather have the free, open source drivers, that sort of work if you are lucky and tweak it the right way and enjoy downloading and compiling gobs of source code, some 6 months after the product is released as well, instead of precompiled binaries that you can install in a couple minutes and work nearly flawlessly and made available the day the hardware is made available.

To each his own I suppose.

Re:ATI

[futuresheep]

This whole ATI vs. Nvidia open source argument bothers me.

1) Nvidia has contracts with SGI that prevents them from disclosing certain features.

2) While the drivers may be done by Nvidia, they are quality drivers.

3) Nvidia goes out of their way to make easy to install .rpms available for several major distro's, along with the kernel source files so you can compile it in yourself if need be. All these files are updated in a VERY timely manner.

4) They have an excellent readme for the install, and if all else fails, a contact email specifically for problems with their drivers.

Personally, I think they've gone farther than ATI by providing the drivers for you, instead of just saying "here's the specs, go figure it out".

Re:ATI

[Krusher55]

Umm, yes, the Rage Pro is supported by GLX and has been for quite a few years thanks mostly to John Carmack and Gareth Hughes. I think there is now a working DRI driver for it as well.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

>2) While the drivers may be done by Nvidia, they are quality drivers.
Is that wy I se lots of various bugs/hangfs on diffrent machines?

And how can you know its quality when you dont have the source?

Re:ATI

[lkaos]

FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD *to the SPAM theme*

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

[Zuchinis]

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.

Re:ATI

[Darren Winsper]

Yeah, the drivers for the Radeon 8500 were flawless at launch, not.

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.

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:ATI

[Ilmari]

That's just the source for the glue code. Take a look at what's in the pacakge, and you'll notice a large .o file... that's the meat of the driver.

Re:ATI

[Darren Winsper]

I'm getting sick of this "SGI contract" thing. There have been SGI people posting on Slashdot who point out its false, yet people still proceed to claim this.

I tell you what, I'll shut up if you can point me to one authoritive source of this claim.

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?

Re:ATI

[max cohen]

I'll bet the NVidia/AMD issue wouldn't have lasted a week (hell maybe not even a day)

IIRC, the Athlon/AGP issue isn't just related to Nvidia products, it happens on ATI products as well. Since Nvidia wrote their own driver, they may have made some error which causes the problem to occur more often.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

This is a lie. NVIDIA is not prevented from disclosing driver source because of contracts with SGI. Heck SGI even open sourced their OpenGL SI a while back, that's basically their reference driver. I agree that NVIDIA has great Linux drivers and applaud them for it (see my other post) but their reluctance to release source code is not because of SGI.

Perhaps they think a company open sourcing drivers and microcode increases their exposure to patent infringement law suits, and IP theft. Or perhaps they have issues because they have agreements with M$ because their code base is contaminated by their SDK (doubtfull).

Re:ATI

[larien]

Hrm, I remember playing linux Quake III in a train using a laptop with an ATI Rage Lt Pro; isn't that the same chipset?

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

[Performer Guy]

You don't understand the complexity of developing high quality functional OpenGL drivers. Each card requires a major project if you are going to do more than support a core subset of what the hardware is really capable of.

Re:ATI

[bokeoa]

A lot of good that does for people trying to get an NVidia card working on a Mac.

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.

Re:ATI

[dinivin]

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

[CynicTheHedgehog]

It wasn't my intention to criticize NVidia; I was trying to point out that both companies support Linux actively in different forms. Call it compare and contrast.

But, to be perfectly fair NVidia has had a jump on ATI as far as Linux drivers and X goes. The GeForce series has been around a lot longer than the Radeon. It would be nice if ATI was more active and open as far as the development process is concerned, but I have faith in the people who are currently working on it.

Re:ATI

[CynicTheHedgehog]

To my knowledge the ATI drivers are included with XFree86, and support for other features (TV in, etc) can be achieved by downloading source or binary packages for other applications (since neither the kernel nor X can really do that stuff). I believe you have to download NVidia driver binaries from their website and agree to some sort of EULA. It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. Someone somewhere is always going to take a source package and make it easy to install, whether it's a distribution maintainer (RedHat) or some industrious software developer.

Re:ATI

[Surak]

While it is certainly commendable that nVIDIA constantly releases new drivers for their cards on Linux, I'll take specs over closed source drivers any day of the week.

Here's why:

If you're always updating your hardware and you keep updating to the latest and greatest video cards, and you don't update your operating system too much, and you don't mess with experimental or drivers for other hardwre in your system (which means that you follow the same basic pattern as a gamer), then great, nVIDIA's development model probably works for you.

However, what if you're still using the GeForce 2 card and plan on using it for at least a couple of years, but you want to keep trying out new Linux distributions and versions, and maybe even experimental kernels? And what if nVIDIA suddenly stops developing new versions of the geForce 2 driver, because they discontinue the card and then have no funding to work on drivers for discontinued cards?

Well, as we all know, older video drivers may or may not work with new versions of XFree, new kernel versions, etc. without being recompiled. If the source isn't available for recompiling, and nVIDIA isn't doing it, who is? No one. So now you're stuck with a piece of hardware that won't take you through to the next version of the OS. You can either A) get another card, or B) not upgrade your OS.

In the Open Source model, at least you have a reasaonable assurance that if the developers of the driver drop it, someone will pick it up, even if that someone ends up being you. :)

Not everyone constantly upgrades their hardware. I know this may sound like an alien concept to the gamers out there, but its true. :)

Re:ATI

[Daemonik]

Odd thing that. I'm quite happy with my Radeon 8500 and two 19inch monitors.

As far as 3d support, most of the games released don't work on Linux to begin with, so big deal.

Re:ATI

[Daemonik]

The only reason nVidia had drivers available is because thier cards have always been binary compatible, once they created a driver they were set for any future releases.

ATI is just starting to develop thier drivers with the binary compatible philosophy, give them time. Not to mention that they've been improving the Radeon drivers at a fast and regular pace, even releasing beta drivers regularly, something that they've never done for their previous cards.

Re:ATI

[Gordy]

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.

IMO, this statement is incorrect. NVIDIA does not give support at a level beyond any other hardware manufacturer. What they give is a different level of support because:

• they DO NOT RELEASE specifications
• they DO NOT RELEASE source code for the Linux driver
• they DO SUPPORT DRIVERS for Linux

Now, since they do not release the source to their drivers this makes moving to different versions of XFree86 problematic until an update is released. This leaves you at the mercy of NVIDIA to fix this issue. Also, simple bugs related to installation and default configuration issues never get solved because there is no flock (think: open source development model here) of developers working towards a bullet proof driver under N configurations.

Also, since they do not release specs this makes a X11 hardware accelerated driver developed outside of NVIDIA of equal or better performance extremely difficult if not impossible. Case in point, the nv driver (for the nvidia chipsets) provided by XFree86 is far superior in quality but not in performance 8(.

Be warned, there will never be a solid (i.e. bullet proof) driver produced by NVIDIA until the source code is released and has gone through an open source development process.

Re:ATI

[Daemonik]

Actually, that's an interesting thought. Considering nVidia's deal with MS for the XBox, I bet that Bill threw in a few clauses detailing in what manner they could distribute thier drivers.

If the XBox (miraculously) starts selling better, or the XBoxII is released with an nVidia chipset, I wonder how much pressure they'll be under to quit supporting Linux entirely.

Re:ATI

[tps12]

Has this changed?

No, this is still accurate. Major PITA, since the GLX X module needs to be the same version as the kernel module, so even though you can install different kernel modules for different versions of your kernel, you are limited to one GLX module at a time. So every time you reboot to a different kernel you need to recompile the GLX module. :(

Re:ATI

[MarkoNo5]

Then why can't I get the latest driver to compile with a 2.4.18 kernel ? All I get is some unresolved symbol error when trying to load the module. And when I use the latest drivers with my older kernel, I can't use 1600x1200@85Hz on my TNT2 although the 300MHz ramdac can perfectly handle it. It refuses anything above 75Hz on that frequency. Why ? Because the stupid box says so. The next videocard I will buy will most likely not be an NVIDIA card, I don't use 3D stuff anyway.

Re:ATI

[jiminim]

> Want to use a GeForce in an Alpha? Oops.

Think there are ONLY binary drivers? You can download source for the NVIDIA GLX driver and the actual kernel module from the NVIDIA website where the rest of the drivers can be found.

Its as simple as make and wowee, you have a brand spanking new driver compiled against your kernel headers.

Re:ATI

[jiminim]

> Or heaven forbid you want to run the latest development kernel.

Just download the SOURCE that can be found on nVidia's driver download page and you will be able to make a custom module for your custom kernel. Works great for me :)

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

But, to be perfectly fair NVidia has had a jump on ATI as far as Linux drivers and X goes

and Windows drivers, for that matter. Let's face it, the only place where ATI's drivers are known to work well is on a Mac, and I can't even be sure of that. This *is* changing, albeit slowly, but nVidia's got a big head start and doesn't seem to be letting up.

Re:ATI

[dinivin]

Wrong... The "source" that you take about just provides for bindings between the kernel and the binary-only GLX driver. And if you're not using an nVidia blessed kernel, tough shit.

Dinivin

Re:ATI

[Etyenne]

Sure, and the day they'll decide that the 5% (or probably lower) market share they get from Linux user is'nt worth the effort they put in releasing Linux driver and stop updating their driver for Linux, what am I gonna do ?

I could continue to use the last released driver. But it probably ain't gonna work with newer kernel. I could stick to the latest supported kernel, but I suppose it's going to piss me off when I will want to upgrade to kernel 3.6.8 in a few year to get support for a feature I really need.

But then, I could upgrade my video card to one supported. I suppose that is what the hardware industry would want me to do. Unfortunately for them, I am not fond of spending money on hardware unless it is really necessary. I am still using parts I bought 6 years ago. I don't expect my video card to satisfy me that long, but I want to get at least a few years out of it.

I am shopping for a video card right now. I will not take the risk of being orphaned by Nvidia, so my money will go to ATi.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

However, what if you're still using the GeForce 2 card and plan on using it for at least a couple of years, but you want to keep trying out new Linux distributions and versions, and maybe even experimental kernels? And what if nVIDIA suddenly stops developing new versions of the geForce 2 driver, because they discontinue the card and then have no funding to work on drivers for discontinued cards?

As long as nVidia's driver model remains the same as it's been since the TNT drivers were released, this isn't an issue. It's a 'what if' scenario, anyway, but a much bigger one in the face of the real world. The TNT and TNT2 chips are, for the most part, unavailable now, but still work with the current nVidia drivers because of the way those drivers are created. Even better, when you do decide to upgrade your card, if you stick with an nVidia card you don't have to hunt down another driver for it if you've kept up with a moderately recent version of the nVidia driver for your old card.

Re:ATI

[pixel fairy]

see utah-glx. you need xfree86-3.3.6 for it to work (which means not the newer distros, though debian stable, freebsd-stable, and netbsd should all be workable)

i had this on a laptop (mandrake installed it by default) and it worked flawlessly even playing heavy gear 2.

couldnt get it to compile on debian. i think its because they mangle xfree86, not sure.

Re:ATI

[Elbows]

But the kernel module is still binary only. Last time I checked running x86 machine code on an Alpha didn't work too well...

Re:ATI

[amorsen]

nVidia uses a source-available shim to insulate the proprietary, binary-only part from the changing kernel. People think that just because they type "make" and something happens, the source is all there. That is unfortunately not true.

Re:ATI

[quakeroatz]

"Then why can't I get the latest driver to compile with a 2.4.18 kernel ?"

Because you're doing something wrong. I'm running 2.4.18 on 5 boxes using TNT,TNT2,Geforce,Geforce3. The Nvidia drivers work fine.

Some tips:
- Recompile your kernel, don't include framebuffer support, REBOOT!
- Be sure to use SYSINCLUDE=/usr/srcpath (its in the README) when making the GLX and kernel NVIDIA drivers.

I don't understand why anyone would complain about Nvidia's Linux drivers. Sure they crash occasionally, ya they're not 100% open source. But they run OpenGL games very well, they're updated extremely frequently.

And on the subject of stability, what are people comparing these Nvidia Linux drivers to? The rock solid stability of the Windows Detonator drivers? LOL... ooops

Invalid_Page_Fault_IRQ_LESS_THAN_ZERO
XOOX32312 31231XXX#@#@#@#@##@#@#
EAX=201 DKAJSDJD3892839XXXXXXXX

Re:ATI

[Darren Winsper]

Err...no. Their drivers are backwards compatible, but their cards are not. There are NVIDIA drivers that will not drive a GeForce 4, or any GeForce. I believe only the 10.xx and up will work with a GeForce3 for example.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, a company looking after the interests of its shareholders should ignore such a minority and such a specialized problem. But don't let that stop your /. pontification - better that they spend time and money supporting every OS out there and publish all their specs and code than continue as a viable company.

Re:ATI

[Afrosheen]

Yeah that'll take a whole 6 minutes out of your day ;P

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think the Alpha platform supported AGP video? How do you expect NVidia to provide drivers if the hardware isn't even compatible.

Re:ATI

[tps12]

Well, in my experience, I'm usually rebooting trying to get some driver to work (recent example is PPP when I got my DSL...I don't like to have unused modules lying around...no, I don't have a good reason). So, lots of kernel recompiles and mucking about before I figure it out, and it ends up being irritating to have to use virtual terminals instead of xterms.

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...

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how you prefer to work, no, you don't have a good reason. How much trouble would it *really* be to have the relevant NVidia GLX/kernel modules saved for when you need them?..sounds like time to rethink your processes, they don't match how you'd rather be working..

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be redundant but I don't care.
Nvidia releases binary only parts of their drivers because the Quadro and Geforce series are the same card. They don't wan't Joe Linux changing the PCI ID routines in the drivers to turn their 200$ video card into a 1000$ one.

Re:ATI

[Newtonian_p]

All you have to do to turn your GeForce into a Quadro is solder in a resistor. No need to play with the drivers and this hack will make it act like a Quadro under both Windows and Linux.

Re:ATI

[T3kno]

This is based on the viewpoint that the Linux community is shrinking, or that Linux users are not using nvidia cards. Both statements to me seem somewhat untrue. I think that nvidia has realized that Linux is not just a fad, but is here to stay, and right now this business model is working for them, and for me (and a lot of other nvidia/Linux users I presume). Maybe in the future they will realize that having only a closed source solution is not optimal and will realease the specs, I hope they do this, but I have no way of knowing. What I am fairly certain about though is that while nvidia is king of the hill they are going to keep support for the Linux community because it is not shrinking.

Re:ATI

[Newtonian_p]

Yes it does.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not true they are not high quality at all
the geforce driver does NOT support APM for laptops: that is to say you cannot suspend
your laptop.
This bug is known for quite some time and NVIDIA refues to correct it!
the driver would be open I guess that the buig would have corrected from day one but NO it is colsed sourc so unless NVIDIA is willing enough
it might be corrected

IT WAS JUST ONE EXAMPLE but for the laptops in general NVIDIA sucks big time!!

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Some Macs ship with NVidia cards, so it obviously works. The drivers are shipped through Apple.

Re:ATI

[mobets]

The neat thing about the nVIDIA drivers is that they work for all nVIDIA cards. The driver someone with a geForce 4 downloads is the same one I get for my geForce 2. By making all of their cards compatible like this, we don't have to wory about them not making drivers for the old cards.

Re:ATI

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Option "NoLogo" "yes"

Poof....no mo logo! :)

RTFM dude!

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

So where are the drivers for the GeForce3 Go?

Where's the source code?

Re:ATI

[Arandir]

I agree. Tomorrow's version of XFree86 will come with ATI drivers. It will not come with current Nvidia drivers. For that you will have to wait until Nvidia gets around to it.

Re:ATI

[tps12]

Yeah, I know. The thing is, I tend to patch my Linux kernels rather than download whole new ones, so I can't recompile, say, the new NVdriver module for Linux 2.4.10 (since I don't have a 2.4.10 source tree anymore).

The only good solution I've thought of (but yet to implement) is to use checkinstall (which I already do) to make binary packages of GLX modules, which I save. Then it's just a matter of a removepkg, installpkg, modprobe and I'm in business.

Re:ATI

[ivan256]

Sweet! Thanks!

Re:ATI

[bokeoa]

The story is about Linux drivers, not MacOS 9 or MacOS X drivers.

I've been using Linux on PowerPCs for about a year and an half now, and anything that is available as binary only is rare to work on them (sometimes companies will release a ppc binary like Loki, but again that's rare.) Also I've been interested in checking out FreeBSD or OpenBSD on my x86, and had I bought a GeForce 3/4 instead of my Radeon 8500, I would have been SOL...

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

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

Sigh. Please don't confuse my thoughts with yours. You're welcome to your thoughts and feel free to expound on them, just don't ascribe them to me.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

Many vendors including NVIDIA have thrown some cash at developers, for example Precision Insight before VA Linux destroyed the company. SGI even gave them some cash. That's actually easier than a real commitment of company manpower.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

I disagree, NVIDIA are very prompt with their driver support, and they include the entire hardware interface, so they don't have to merge with something like the DRI.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

P.S. The real issue is not whether it works with some future version of X, that changes infrequently and I get all the functionality I need today. The real issue is do I get support for hardware features in the product I purchased. With NVIDIA the answer is a resounding YES. I get FULL hardware support, with antialiasing, register combiners programmability, you name it. That is not true with other vendors. There are a lot of people commenting here when they don't know an OpenGL extension from a desktop theme. When I say NVIDIAs drivers are great there's more than some mantra "open source = best" backing it up.

Re:ATI

[cobar]

The guys at the Nvidia petition keep track of a few guys trying to port the drivers to FreeBSD. Unfortunately there haven't been many updates lately and I got tired of waiting and installed Linux till the drivers are ready. Too much fiddling in order to get a Voodoo 5 to work.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

Most of those professional cards had no commitment from the IHVs many of the 'pro' drivers are half assed and created by throwing money and some specs at a 3rd party driver developer, they are ALWAYS in a distant second place to their Windows efforts. NVIDIA have great drivers for a four main reasons I'd say. Firstly they got of to a good start with SGI helping them before SGI bailed on yet another plan, secondly the are cash rich and able to spend the resources, thirdly and probably most importantly they reuse a MOST of the driver code from their windows code base and finally they seem to have a genuine appreciation that Linux support is a good strategic move for their business (for whatever reason).

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

Laptop driver support is uniquely problematic because the hardware & firmware varies significantly from OEM to OEM. Getting recent driver support on Laptops is problematic even on Windows.

Re:ATI

[drinkypoo]

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.

Maybe they should pay some developers to work on their windows drivers, which are terrible.

If the quality (or lack thereof) of the windows drivers are any indication, they're paying them chicken scratch - okay if your programmers are chickens, but they don't have very large brains, and I wouldn't trust them to match up the parentheses while writing hello world.

Re:ATI

[darkonc]

it is colsed sourc so unless NVIDIA is willing enough

This points to the heart of the difference between open-source and closed source.

Closed source anything is at the mercy of the source vendor's business model. If and when what you want to do is consistent with what the vendor makes money allowing you to do, then closed source is fine. If/when what you want to do is inconsistent with the vendor's business model (unless they don't realize it), then you're pretty much SOL.

Open source allows development to be at the whim of the user base. It's pretty common that buyer interests and seller interests are not the same. Those differences also tend to increase as the stuff being sold gets older and older.

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for native FreeBSD driver support... Stuff that comes with XFree86 works on any XFree86 platform. Stuff that comes from Nvidia only works on what Nvidia got around to.

Re:ATI

[Skapare]

While I don't have any experiences using NVIDIA drivers, I have heard several horror stories about the inability to make certain system changes, such as upgrading a kernel to a new version due to some bug that makes this necessary, and finding that the driver being used croaks the whole machine. I don't remember if any of those stories involved NVIDIA drivers specifically, but they did involve video drivers with a kernel component that was NOT open source (e.g. was a binary-only module). Perhaps it could be the case that NVIDIA makes flawless code, and compiles a version of their driver for every architecture using the bus they support, and for every kernel and X version within 24 hours after they are released (something that can be easily accomplished by tracking the -rc versions every day). Perhaps they do this. Perhaps not. But there is value in having the source code so that you can choose to fix the driver yourself. Often times it is a simple fix, like merely recompiling.

I will always prefer the open source.

My form of dissing NVIDIA is simply to tell the truth about how they make their driver available, and explaining the advantages of having a community of many people doing the development, inspection, and testing ... and by NOT buying anything made by NVIDIA.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

I think you are in the extreme minority.

Re:ATI

[Performer Guy]

P.S.

The original question (and article) was about hardware manufacturers who support Linux, nothing in there about BSD.

Re:ATI

[Paul Komarek]

I believe that HP worked with Pixar on one of the professional cards, maybe the FireGL but I'm fairly sure not any NVidia product, and I believe the resulting driver source was made available. I expect that Pixar went into this with their eyes open, and wouldn't accept half-assed drivers. But then, maybe Pixar is a half-baked company run by monkies that has just gotten lucky. ;-)

I don't mean to start a flame-war between ATI and NVidia (clearly I'm too late to *start* one anyway ;-). I simply expect that the professionals using accellerated OpenGL + Linux for animation or flight simulation (or other apps I haven't heard of) are not using consumer level cards with internal accuracy less than or equal to a C float. From that supposition, I concluded that there are 3D cards with accelleration under Linux which have high-quality OpenGL drivers.

-Paul Komarek

Re:ATI

[Arandir]

God forbid you should use any hardware that's supported on more platforms that Linux.

Re:ATI

[Fluffy the Cat]

Think there are ONLY binary drivers?

Yes, if you want 3D support.

You can download source for the NVIDIA GLX

I assume you're talking about the source RPM they provide? Sure, it's a source RPM (in that you can't install it directly and it lets you build a binary RPM). It doesn't actually have any source, though. Everything in it is a binary, and the Makefile's only target is "install".

the actual kernel module

You're right, we do have some source here. It gets built and then linked against a file called Module-nvkernel to give the final kernel module. Module-nvkernel doesn't have any source included with it. It's almost a megabyte of something that file claims is

Module-nvkernel: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped

See that "Intel 80386" bit there? Oddly enough, that's not going to run terribly well on an Alpha. We have 280K of source which is possibly portable to other architectures and a 1MB binary file that's required and which isn't in any way portable to other architectures.

Its as simple as make and wowee, you have a brand spanking new driver compiled against your kernel headers.

Yes, as long as you're running on x86. Which Alpha isn't. If you're going to try to correct me, could you please put some effort into checking your facts beforehand?

Re:ATI

[Dwonis]

nVidia's drivers are crap. They're always behind, and the last I used them (before I dumped my NV card for a real one due to too many hassles), they didn't even support DRI.

Re:ATI

[Dwonis]

That's a nice excuse now, but when software -- especially operating systems -- becomes a commodity (and it's already happening), that kind of attitude will lose you your job or your company.

Re:ATI

[jchristopher]

Getting recent driver support on Laptops is problematic even on Windows.

Not really. Suspend seems to work fine on all the Macs and PCs I've tried, with both ATI and Nvidia cards. It's only Linux that seems to have problems making suspend work properly.

That's not to say there aren't reasons for that, but it does seem to be the current situation.

Re:ATI

[Dwonis]

The delay is still there. You just get a white screen, rather than a white screen with "NVIDIA" on it.

Re:ATI

[Dwonis]

ATI only releases a portion of the specs to a small group of developers who have signed an NDA.

It's a click-through NDA that anyone can get (unless there's some OTHER NDA that you're talking about). I got the access to the specs in about a week after I registered.

Re:ATI

[Paul Komarek]

Oops, my bad. s/pixar/dreamworks/.

-Paul Komarek

Re:ATI

[fyonn]

it's because the pre-compiled binaries are only precompiled to work nuder certain situations, if the nvidia drivers were poen then they could be ported to, say, freebsd nice and easily. as it is they just won't work.

dave

Re:ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

"...and the last I used them (before I dumped my NV card for a real one due to too many hassles), they didn't even support DRI."

They still don't support DRI. They have their own kernel-level interface that they use because when they were first porting their drivers, DRI wasn't stable enough to be useful yet!

I'll agree that porting over to DRI would be nice, but it's hardly necessary to do so.

Re:ATI

[Krusher55]

Ahhh, yes, very true, but the topic was about hardware vendors supporting Linux, not FreeBSD.

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)

Re:Note:

[Afrosheen]

3com 3c905's and 3c509's have a tendency to choke/act weird/not work at all under Mandrake 8/8.1/8.2. Better off with a $10 dlink or netgear card with the realtek chipset.

Re:Note:

[Anonymous Coward]

3com cards seem to work on everything

Maybe, if you can be the computer to boot. I've found from personal experience, the 3coms really screw with the boot process. I've had to physically remove the cards to even get linux installed. In the end, I replaced them with cheap Realtek-chipset cards.

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.

Nokia

[xnok]

Nokia is a big supporter of Linux, and have shown commitment. Their wireless PCMCIA cards (almost impossible to find, and overpriced) come with linux drivers and source code that was developed in-house.

Some...but not many

[Moneky-Boy]

I know Epson is in line with Linux and open source. They don't claim it without proper acknowledgment. Yet there are few companies that are headstrong about Linux like Nvidia. Yes Nvidia might only give a little source, but that is their right. At least they are developing for the Linux arena.

If the game developers start to support Linux then the Hardware will follow.

Re:Some...but not many

[punkball]

If the game developers start to support Linux then the Hardware will follow.

This is of course a valid point, but unlikely after watching the recent and unfortunate demise of Loki.

Re:Some...but not many

[Anonymous Coward]

> If the game developers start to support Linux then the Hardware will follow.

If the game *players* start to support Linux game developers by spending money, then the Software will follow.

Re:Some...but not many

[HalifaxPenguin]

Speaking of games, does anyone know if there is anything at all going on with joystick/gamepad support? Ever since I've been on a 2.4 kernel, I've had no luck getting anything to work. Any info I can find seems to pertain either to 2.0 or 2.2 kernels, or plans for the "upcoming" 2.4 kernel series.

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!

Re:Creative Labs

[Malc]

No DXR3 in there though. However, I'm willing to bet the devices that are supported have drivers with fewer bugs and less unnecessary crapware.

Re:Creative Labs

[jtshaw]

DXR3 is supported by the open source community. The drivers used to be a crap shoot, and didn't always work, but they have made huge steps in the last 6 months. dxr3.sourceforge.net has all the info. The 0.12 release works well for me with MPlayer. I haven't done any VGA overlay though, I strickly use TV out when using the DXR3.

Re:Creative Labs

[Mike Hicks]

Yeah, but they don't give out all of their specs. From what I understand, some info is given out, but a lot of stuff has to be reverse-engineered..

Re:Creative Labs

[Anonymous Coward]

As I mentioned earlier... creative is all talk and no cock and balls. They do very little beyond running a website and cvs server. How did this get modded up so high?

Re:Creative Labs

[0x0d0a]

I believe this used to be the case.

Frankly, I'd like to see Creative just write up a bunch of source, send it to the ALSA guys, and have everyone be happy. They get their cards supported out of box on new Linux systems, the ALSA guys get top notch support (ALSA emu10k1 support is good but lacks DSP microcode support, unlike the OSS drivers), and the users Just Have Things Work.

Zero marks for

[BrokenHalo]

UMAX - probably the worst supported scanners under Linux - I've got an Astra 610P, and still have to use WINE to get it to work :-

Re:Zero marks for

[hyperstation]

i had one of those too, but it started shooting sparks out at me after it received some smoke damage from a house fire. you've been warned.

oh, and i never could get it to work w/linux. :)

Re:Zero marks for

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Their USB scanners aren't supported either. I've got a 2100U... Come to think of it, the Win2K drivers for the thing are kludgy too...

Re:Zero marks for

[AJWM]

That's what you get for trying to run an input device on a printer port.

My UMAX Astra 600S -- the SCSI port version -- works just fine under Linux, never had a problem with it. (I don't use the cheap scanner-only SCSI card that came with it though, it's on a cheap AHA1540-clone card instead.)

Re:Zero marks for

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a UMAX Powerlook SCSI, very old. Works great with SANE.

Re:Zero marks for

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually got my 600S to sort of work with the
included "scsi" card.

Then I got sick of messing with it and bought
a scsi card for $20. It works fine, but I
had to buy a $22 cable on top of the
card - death to scsi and its expensive
cabling which comes in 500 different forms!

Re:Zero marks for

[Anonymous Coward]

My UMAX 1220P (parallel port) scanner is working great under Linux.

Go to http://umax1220p.sourceforge.net/ and download the patch to make Sane support it.

I'm still angry at UMAX for not releasing the specs to the Sane community, but Stef has done a great job of reverse-engineering it.

Re:Zero marks for

[Anonymous Coward]

You think UMAX is bad? Try Visioneer.

Linksys

[misfit13b]

They've been pretty Linux-friendly in my experience for my home networking...

Re:Linksys

[diparfitt]

My linksys ethernet card came with linux and other bsd drivers. and they worked really good.

Re:Linksys

[gmack]

you did it the hard way.. next time just use the DEC tulip drivers included with the kernel.

Re:Linksys

[The Asmodeus]

What's more is the 4 port Cable/DSL router I bought came with a Turbo Linux install CD. I mean, it's one thing to ship drivers but including a CD of Linux is top's in my book!

Re:Linksys

[ksplatter]

Linksys is only as linux friendly as the distro that you are trying to install. Linksys May work fine on Redhat, Suse and some others. I had the hardest freaking time trying to run with my Linksys PCMCIA card on Mandrake. The linksys page was everything BUT helpful. MOstly outdated. I finally found help on Google Groups. In my opinion Linksys Linux Support sucks but Googles Linksys support Rocks!

Its funny how people say that there hardware is linux friendly. I wanna see some posts about people's hardware not working and how helpful the particular vendor was in resolving that issue. Thats when the we can say a company has good linux support. All the other times we can just thank all the opensource people out there for writing good drivers :)

Re:Linksys

[habig]

Linksys apparently cooperates with the kernel guys, but they will not support your linux problems.

And there will be linux problems. Step number one with a linksys card is to throw out whatever ancient driver they ship with, and get the latest drivers from the kernel tree and/or the pcmcia project.

Although including a linux install CD is a nice (if useless for most of us) touch indeed.

linksys

[Anonymous Coward]

linksys seems to at least TEST on linux (according to their NIC boxes), and they provide linux drivers. I've never called them or anything, but I've never needed to either.

Any company....

[mixbsd]

... that doesn't kowtow to M$ by making devices that aren't Win*-specific should promote this issue. You only have to see what idiocy created winmodems to see what I mean.

Re:Any company....

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, yeah, if they just put a chip that cost a few dollars more on the modem it would be normal. Dear god, why did they take my jumpers away!!! Now with PNP for some reason I have less of a chance of getting my device X working!

Re:Any company....

[Afrosheen]

Idiocy didn't create winmodems, bean-counters at major companies did.

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...

Video Card Manufacturers

[MrZaius]

Quite a number of video card manufacturers produce at least binary support for their devices. Matrox, NVidia, 3dfx, and ATI all play a leading, or at least active, roll in their driver development.

Matrox especially stands out, offering their alternative XFree86 binaries and wonderful configuration tool to get dualhead displays working (powerdesk)

Re:Video Card Manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. 3Dfx is dead. And while they lived, they didn't make no Linux drivers. It's been a year since they went under, though, so the community-written substitutes work admirably.

Re:Video Card Manufacturers

[Artana Niveus Corvum]

Actually 3dfx produced some rather splendid linux drivers, though by modern standards they sorta sucked... but hey, my voodoo banshee worked better under linux than my tnt2 ever did (until fairly recently of course when nvidia's drivers got closed source and stopped sucking)

(by the way, I am an avid supporter of open source and if nvidia didn't have their sgi nda whatnot I'm sure they'd open source their drivers just like they used to... and on top of that there has already been some discussion of opening up certain portions of their drivers anyway...)

It's not as widespread as I'd like

[El Hooloovoo]

I was very pleased to find that Linksys was offering source drivers for my wireless USB network device, and that NVIDIA offers Linux source drivers as well (I've been out of the Linux loop for a while). I just wish more hardware vendors would follow their example and start supporting non-standard operating systems.

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....

Re:Nvidia...

[ZaMoose]

And the fact that all I had to do was add an

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...

Re:Nvidia...

[CAVE^MAN]

My big gripe with nvidia/linux is that they don't use the standard DRI stuff and they require you to replace your glx module. Because you have to replace the module any other card you try to run with it makes X crash! I had to get an ATi card just to use my second head. I not really against nvidia's binary only drivers I just want compatibility with my other hardware too, and on linux that usually means source code for drivers, they could put a restrictive license on it but being able to change the source on my machine so that ALL my hardware worked would have kept me buying nvidia wheras not I'm only using ati :/

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+

nividia and PCtel

[GutBomb]

I would have to say nvidia. they don't provide open source drivers, but usually their windows & linux driver updates are released at the same time, and actually right now, thier linux drivers are a bit more current then the official windows ones. (i am running the 28.80's in linux, but nvidia has only released 28.30 i think for windows) If i have to name another besides windows, I would have to say PCTEL. back in the days when NO winmodems worked, they had linux kernel modules for thier modems, even obscure onboard ones. I haven't heard much from them lately however.

Re:nividia and PCtel

[unmadindu]

Latest driver is 0.9.1 little buggy..but works (www.peacefulaction.org/sayamindu/pctel.html)

Re:nividia and PCtel

[gukin]

You really can't compare PCtel and NVIDIA, PCTel only had some interest when Corel was trying to make a cheap Linux machine. PCTel hacked some stuff together but ultimately their stuff and Corel failed. It is still possible to use PCtel modems under Linux (i86 only) by getting the closed source drivers from:http://www.medres.ch/~jstifter/pctel/. I've had mixed success dialing into one of these modems but they work quite nicely connecting to ISP's etc.

NVIDIA has worked hard getting high quality drivers out to the diverse linux population which are easy to install and use. NVIDIA tries hard PCtel allowed Jan Stifter to continue using his NDA and to develop the PCTel drivers.

Kudos to NVIDIA and Jan Stifter. I just wish that PCTel would acknowledge that significant hardware decisions (which notebook computer to buy) are based on which stupid winmodem the customer will have to fool with to get it working. Jan does good work and his drivers are easy to install.

Quite a bit, actually.

[awptic]

I've been subscribed to the linux kernel mailing list for some time, and there's quite a bit of discussion
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.

Re:Quite a bit, actually.

[novafire]

But I have yet to see drivers for the Promise Fasttrak that support RAID setups.

Re:Quite a bit, actually.

[Abnormal Coward]

Have a look at:

http://www.promise.com/support/linux_eng.asp

and if I remember linux kernel version 2.4.18 has support for the Promise IDE raid controllers, along with the HighPoint drivers. (if not, theres an patch somewhere for it, have a search for ATA66+linux).

Re:Quite a bit, actually.

[novafire]

I believe this only allows the controller to opperate as a regular IDE controller.

But I will check out the link.

Re:Quite a bit, actually.

[neroz]

Some of those SGI/SUN/IBM people you see on the list, are actually paid to work on the kernel. :-)
IBM is the most common that I see, and they are working on important stuff (scalability). Very cool.

Agere and 3Com

[scumdamn]

Both Agere and 3Com have drivers available that they've written.
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

[Anonymous Coward]

Write their own drivers. Usually coinciding with the release of the product.

Re:Matrox

[nvrrobx]

I haven't found any *BSD support directly from Matrox. You can use XFree 4.2.0's mga driver on a G450 just fine, but it runs at 1x AGP with no OpenGL acceleration.

(If anyone knows a way to change this under FreeBSD 4.5 or 5.0, let me know!)

Re:Matrox

[neroz]

Do you have the drm-kmod port installed? I thought that supported the Matrox line. My Voodoo3 was hardware accelerated after installing that..

Re:Matrox

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the AGP 1x issue due to the lack of AGP support in FreeBSD?

Re:Matrox

[Arandir]

My G450+ works just fine with 4x AGP and OpenGL acceleration (without even having to use drm-kmod).

Re:Matrox

[Arandir]

My Matrox G450+ works just fine under FreeBSD-4.5, using a stock XFree86-4.2.0. I get kernel accelerated OpenGL and the best 2D acceleration I have ever seen off of any card. And it worked out of the box! No drm-kmod or hal needed. No bizzare kernel configurations or init scripts. I just needed to copy the kernel modules out of /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri and into /modules. This is on an A7M266 mobo.

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 (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.

Re:Compaq

[A Masquerade]

Compaq kit works OK if you use vendor (ie stock RH) kernels. The RAID controllers are well supported in mainline kernels.

However the on-board monitoring requires binary closed source modules which crap all over your kernel if its anything other than RH stock - so if (for example) you want some extra drivers and FreeSWAN then using Compaqs monitoring modules you can crash the machine in 3 seconds purely by cat-ing a few /proc files!

The installer is interesting as well - it "fixes up" the modules to load with the current kernel - forget ABI compatibility - this forces modules into an incompatible kernel and modifies the version stamps so you don't notice.

And compaq's packaging stuff is shit - why does no one have any idea how to make rpms - these do really stupid things. The only worse packager than compaq are ibm who have binary rpms which build new rpms on install!

Basically never trust any vendor that uses ServerWorks chipsets (ie both Compaq and IBM) - the big NDAs surrounding those chipsets will come back and bite you hard!

Re:Compaq

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as it isn't one of their laptops. I went round and round with them trying to get them to divulge how to turn on the audio mixer in a Presario 700US (The sound worked but was extremely low in volume). They could have helped very easily but refused.

Finally, a guy posted a patch I found through google. It turns out that the jack sense register of the AD1886 chip had to be set to a particular value on initializing the driver. This was a very simple fix that a guy at Compaq probably could have rattled off in ten seconds if they had bothered to ask.

I won't be buying Compaq again if I can at all avoid it.

NetGear

[Anonymous Coward]

NetGear has always had great Linux support. Any NIC I bought from them (including the wireless 802.11b PCMCIA (MA401) I just got), came with src to compile a driver. Of course, the kernel superceeds most of these drivers, but it's still nice to see the support.

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.

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)

Re:For USB scanners: Epson

[larien]

Yup, got an Epson scanner which took me a little while to get working, but nothing difficult; just that I'd never used Sane before. I now do my scanning in linux rather than Windows, as I can understand Xsane better than the Windows software which came with the scanner.

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!

Re:For USB scanners: Epson

[iangoldby]

Yes, getting my Epson GT7000 (SCSI) scanner working with Mandrake 8.1 required absolutely nothing on my part. It Just Worked. (I did have minor problems with devfs though, meaning if the scanner is not switched on when I last booted, I have to reboot.) Unfortunately, the colour matching in SANE is much inferior to the Windows Epson driver, especially in transparency mode.

Needless to say, my Epson Stylus 740 works very well. It's just a pity that some of the very dark tones seem to lose colour saturation under GIMP Print compared to the Windows driver.

Re:For USB scanners: Epson

[cyclist1200]

I hate to "me too", but I have to say I have never had a problem getting either my Epson Perfection 1200 scanner or Epson Stylus 740 to work.

nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, nVidia are developing their own linux drivers.

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.

Re:Many do..

[phaze3000]

I decided that it would be better to reply to your mis-information than simply mod you down.. I'll leave that job to somebody else.. :)

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.

ATI (sortof. at least their linux drivers sucks as much as windows one..)

I've got an ATI Radeon in my machine, my gf has an ATI Radeon in her Windows 2000 box, and I can confidently say that the Linux drivers are far better than those for Windows, probably because ATI didn't write them. ATI (unlike nVidia) have been very good about releasing specs to the community.

There's one company everyone seems to be missing out here: Adaptec. They took over maintenance of the SCSI drivers for their cards in the Linux kernel a while ago, and they've put a lot of work into them.

Re:Many do..

[lkaos]

I've got an ATI Radeon in my machine, my gf has an ATI Radeon in her Windows 2000 box, and I can confidently say that the Linux drivers are far better than those for Windows, probably because ATI didn't write them. ATI (unlike nVidia) have been very good about releasing specs to the community.

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..

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an ATi fanboy hiding in every shadow...

As an owner of an 8500 and a Geforce2, I can tell you that the nVidia drivers are GREAT. I never had a stability problem with them in my machine. However, the ATi "drivers" aren't worth the bandwidth it takes to download the latest version of XF86. I've abandoned any hope of using linux while the 8500 is in my machine.

I'd much rather have binary support (hey, I'm NOT going to pour over the source code to anything, I'm not a programmer) than no official support at all. Being redirected to the XF86 homepage is not what I consider support.

Of course, with the state of drivers from ATi (latest betas fix a lot of game slow downs, but still have broken dvd acceleration, how can you break dvd while fixing OpenGL??? THE TWO AREN'T RELATED) maybe it's best they don't divide their attention away from the majority of their users...

Re:Many do..

[sehryan]

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.

Bzzt.. wrong! nVidia has the source. DUH!

Re:Many do..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you disagree with him, fine. But you don't need to be an asshole about it.

Re:Many do..

[psavo]

I decided that it would be better to reply to your mis-information than simply mod you down.. I'll leave that job to somebody else.. :)
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.

Re:Many do..

[ninewands]

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.

Bzzzzt ... wrong!

Sources for both the kernel driver and the GLX driver are available from Nvidia's linux download page in both SRPM and tarball format. This is necessary because NVidia cannot possibly provide binaries for all possible combinations of distro/kernel (the nvidia drivers have to be compiled for a specific kernel version) that might exist, especially since there exists such things as LFS, Rock Linux and Sorcerer Linux.

As for fixing the stability problems ... well, I guess you are free to do so, but the drivers are NOT "free software". Technically, I guess they are not REALLY Open Source either since you can't re-distribute the modified driver, but I imagine nvidia might look with favor on receiving a contributed patch, provided it didn't break something else.

Re:Many do..

[dinivin]

You really need to get a clue.

The SRPM and tarballs that contiain the GLX driver "source" don't contain the GLX driver source. And the kernel source simply provides hooks for the driver into the kernel, and contains none of the functionality for the card.

Dinivin

Re:Many do..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Bzzt.. wrong! nVidia has the source. DUH!

...which is valuable to you until nVidia decides not to support that hardware anymore, at which point no one is *maintaining* the source. Or until nVidia prioritizes the problems with the driver, and decides that some problems' solutions aren't cost-effective and will never be solved.

Re:Many do..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sources for both the kernel driver and the GLX driver are available from Nvidia's linux download page [nvidia.com] in both SRPM and tarball format. This is necessary because NVidia cannot possibly provide binaries for all possible combinations of distro/kernel (the nvidia drivers have to be compiled for a specific kernel version) that might exist, especially since there exists such things as LFS, Rock Linux and Sorcerer Linux.

That GLX driver is a *very* thin wrapper around the nVidia GLX binary. No possibility of community involvement there.

The kernel driver is a reasonable source wrapper around the blob o' bits that actually talks to the hardware. Performance/stability problems with the driver as a whole are there, not in the kernel wrapper code. So, no possibility of fixing problems by non-nVidia folks.

Re:Many do..

[Velox_SwiftFox]

There's one company everyone seems to be missing out here: Adaptec. They took over maintenance of the SCSI drivers for their cards in the Linux kernel a while ago, and they've put a lot of work into them.

Unfortunately, I have to deal with some systems that have Adaptec RAID cards installed. They haven't released anything sourcewise since their "unsupported" 25Jul2001 patches for the I2O-based controllers.

Someone should inform them that there is a general-purpose kernel distribution past version 2.4.6 too...

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...

MS Keyboard...

[frleong]

FWIW, Microsoft Keyboards are nicely supported under Linux, although not by the manufacturer (why need it anyway, when the BIOS itself supports keyboard input?)

I second this...

[gfxguy]

Giving specs to the "community" is a great step for companies to take. I'm sure you'd get mixed reactions from slashdotters between having closed source linux drivers, or community created open source drivers.

I think making the specs public is all we ever really asked for.

Re:I second this...

[Zathrus]

I think making the specs public is all we ever really asked for.

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.

Re:I second this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I fully agree that companies have the right to make totally closed source drivers, BUT what I don't see is why can't they tell us how the damn thing works.

Even if the implementation is very complex, I'd still like knowing that it's possible for me to find out how the hardware actually works (on driver level).

I bought the hardware and they're not even telling me how to use it!

Re:I second this...

[ImaLamer]

I second this!

I praise the points the OSS community makes when it complains about people like nVidia, who release drivers but not trade secrets, or a company which only gives the community so much information to get the device to work.

I understand their need. What if it doesn't work. Not having the source makes it almost impossible for there to be a good work around. What if you want to do something cool with your device? You can't until more is known.

BUT! In some cases your device manufacturer may have just sold that same source code for a pretty penny. You can't expect them to publish on the web as well. If they are subcontracting - making hardware for a non-computer company then don't expect them to reveal all the secrets.

Let them support the hardware first. Sometimes there are things you may not understand that keeps them from just saying:

"HERE IS HOW THE DEVICE WORKS! - COMPETITORS PLEASE COPY IT"

The hardware business is one of secrecy.

Re:I second this...

[gfxguy]

I agree - and I don't think I (in particular) was bitching, just saying that between the two I think the OS community would prefer specs instead of drivers.

On the other hand, you have those companies that don't think Linux is worthwhile enough to write proprietary drivers on their own time, and yet still won't release the specs. Then nobody wins.

Re:I second this...

[Anonymous Coward]

More companies have gone bankrupt keeping secrets than have by being open. Free your mind, and the rest will follow.

Re:I second this...

[anshil]

I don't agree at all

When I'm a company there is not real technical problem in buying a competitor product, open it and look how it functions. It think it's legelly even legal. Don't come me what you thing is "right", but as I understood the laws reverse engineering is _not_ illegal at all. (as long there is no "valid" patent on the used technology)

I use and used to be working with embedded products, and everytime I get some interesting box in my fingers (i.e. a friend buyed a firewall, or a modem, or a fax. I find it frilling to open the box, to take a look what CPU they used, what RAM, ROM or Flash they could get/buy, how the print is layered, how much layers they needed etc.

Secondly when I buy a hardware product I buy exactly this, a hardware product, and not a "functionality extension within an os". So I feel it's my right to interact with the hardware, and to know how my PC interacts with it. The company may not do on the PCI bus like it wants, it also has to keep the voltages in valid ranges and all that :o)

In general why I guess that some companies don't give out specs for the interfaces is because the reponsible posts just have no spines. Will it cost my job _not_ to everything secret? guess no, can it cost my job to publish something? If you publish the wrong thing yes, However if you publish the right thing it can get you a raise. For me it's a matter of spine to make career.

From another standpoint, people are always thinking whats best for companies? Thats not the right way to think as a human. A human should ask himself whats best for the society as whole? I mean every company has to watch to keep alive, thats what it should do, but never should forget what companies are for after all. To add something for the society, the community of all people. And there a lot of the greedy all-to-me philosophy fails. But in the long run a freer community will survive eitherway better, as people help each other out, show them the interfaces to their boxes etc. while a parallell closed community will just survive less good. Thats how evolution _will_ take place. It's just a question, do you want to be part of a closed no-one-communicates-with-no-one-just-in-case-commu ntiy or and community targeted to work a bit together. I guess one can estimate witch one will survive in the long run. (some decades, maybe centriues). At least I want to be on a living branch of society, not the dead one.

Re:I second this...

[BrynM]

This seems like the id Software model. When the technology's old and not relevant to the cutting edge, let the community have it. After all, the community has supported the company for a while.

It seems a natural step in the symbiotic consumer/producer relationship to me. It would be nice for more software developers and hardware developers to see the trust this creates.

Re:I second this...

[BrynM]

"When I'm a company"
"Don't come me what you thing is 'right'"
"everytime I get some interesting box in my fingers" (this one just has too many connotations)
"I find it frilling"
"Will it cost my job _not_ to everything secret? guess no,"
"For me it's a matter of spine to make career"
"maybe centriues"

If you're drunk, have one for me :)

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 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.)

Re:hit and miss...

[laserjet]

damnit! Sorry for leaving that tag open... I promise to preview my next post!

Re:hit and miss...

[mixbsd]

HP is very much hit 'n' miss with Windows drivers, let alone Linux support. Still got no Win2k support for my HP ScanJet 3200C flatbed scanner!

Re:hit and miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that you did leave it off. I've seen the submit leave off the , even though I had it in there.

Re:hit and miss...

[Lumpy]

the problem is not the company as a whole but the subcompanies it is made of.

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.

Re:hit and miss...

[Lumpy]

NOTE: The above is a result of a really crappy keyboard.... ARRGH I need a keyboard that will last more than 3 months!!!!

Re:hit and miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

ARRGH I need a keyboard that will last more than 3 months!!!!

Go to PC Keyboard then and buy a keyboard built just like the old PS/2 keyboards were.

Yeah, they're more expensive. Good luck killing one short of an act of God.

IIRC, they have both the original clicky and a newer non-clicky keyboard available, both with the heavy weight, replacable keycaps, et. al. of old IBM keyboards.

Re:hit and miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

The HP Linux Strategy breafing is a very interesting video ... which I can't watch because it is in Windows Media Player format.

Re:hit and miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itanium is really cool. I like Itanium.

Re:hit and miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fullpage ad from HP in the papers, in todays news ( "metro", the dutch version ), was over a 50% rebate on HP PCs valid only for today.
From the specs lists below the pictures of a laptop, a server, and a station, the only words that were in bold font were:
-windows XP professional included
-office XP professional included

Now, tell me how well compaq is supporting linux nowadays, after how they ve been sooo involved since day 1. Probably by releasing specs of the alpha ?

Re:hit and miss...

[questforme]

FYI, HP is moving to Debian on the new Itanium's(McKinley's). I did fiddle with the Redhat distribution on the current Itanium but not enough to form a constructive opinion. Kent

Re:hit and miss...

[0x0d0a]

Scanner support is really annoying. I wish that people would just make HID-compliant USB scanners and solve the problem for once and for all.

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.

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.

Re:Gigabyte has been good to me.

[SPiKe]

As far as inkjet printers go, you can't go wrong with Epson. I have an Epson Stylus C80 and it works great using CUPS and the gimp-print drivers.

Re:Gigabyte has been good to me.

[ncc74656]

As far as inkjet printers go, you can't go wrong with Epson.

...as long as you don't mind the stupid POS clogging its nozzles after a few months. :-P (This was a constant problem with the demo printers back when I worked for The Man.)

Others have noted that Lexmark provides halfway-decent Linux support for its printers. I have an Optra Color 40; while it doesn't need Ghostscript as a print processor (it groks PostScript all by itself), Lexmark provides source code for a command-line utility to swap cartridges and do other maintenance tasks. (Others have made WIMP tools that do the same.) As for the other models (the ones that don't even do PCL, let alone PostScript), others have said various models work as well. I don't have any experience with them, though. It's also worth noting that if the nozzles get clogged beyond hope of unclogging, you don't have to send the printer in for repair...you buy a new cartridge for $25, pop it in, and get back to work.

Wavelan/Orinoco/Lucent

[dreamt]

Well, whatever their name is today, the Lucent/Wavelan wireless ethernet card is pretty well supported. Lucent has released their own binary-only drivers, but from reading the wireless mailing lists (or faqs, I forget), they also seem to work with the person who has developed the Open Source drivers as well.

Re:Wavelan/Orinoco/Lucent

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, but unfortunately, even when a company GPLs it, it doesn't mean a quality product.
I've fought with the spectrum24t drivers (check sourceforge) for my Nortel Networks e-mobility card (flashed to 2.51 at the factory and can't go back down) and all it does is blow up...
I guess if I had the skill I could fix it. Alas, I don't. And I'd report it as a bug, but it seems well known you need the "right" firmware to get anywhere with those cards in linux.

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
(among others, there are Dell, Egenera ..)

Linux Hardware
http://www.linuxhardware.org/

Linux at IBM
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/

Linux at Compaq
http://www.compaq.com/products/software/linux/

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/

Citrix - metaframe people

[Hyperfrog]

Hmm.. the joys of using FreeBSD as your main system, and having a nice thin client (TM) so you can have a TS window to use as well.

Best of both world in my opinion.. you get a nice stable FreeBSD box as your main OS, and you have any M$ crap which your company really needs to use in the TS window. And, since the Terminal Server tends to be one hell of a box, it works fine.

Oh.. and the client (so far as I know) for linux (works nicely on BSD) was released by Citrix. (However, I don't have any evidence either way as to who wrote it), but it looks like Citrix. Feel free to correct me if you have evidence stating otherwise.

Epson printers

[jcphil]

Check over at linuxprinting.org and you will see that they have a near perfect record for working with Linux.

What is a good External Modem for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a good external 56K modem that will work with Linux with a minimum of hassle?

Re:What is a good External Modem for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what is a good internal or external 56K modem that will work with both Windows and Linux, as well?

Re:What is a good External Modem for Linux?

[smallblackdog]

any external modem should work with linux. If the manufacturer doesn't make drivers just use generic drivers/setup provided with your linux distro. Before ADSL I had an Allied Data 'Tornado FMV 56.0e' It was brilliant, took all of 2 minutes to set up under yast2 (SuSe 6.3) It works under Windows but that is extraneous.

http://www.allieddata.com

Cost my 49 Pounds Sterling last summer.

Re:What is a good External Modem for Linux?

[Aging_Newbie]

Almost any external will work fine. I use Creative Labs Modem Blaster and it works with everything and actually gets real close to 56K too, unlike winmodems that won't do better than 40K on my line ...

dell

[myspys]

www.domsch.com/linux

Not Efficient Networks

[Dark Coder]

During my employment at Efficient Networks, there were many internal battles to implement and deliver Linux drivers for the 3060/3061 DSL PCI adapter cards.

The battle was barely won (or lost asoundly, depending on whose perspectives). Efficient decided to implement DSL drivers on 2.4.0-pre8 (or something close to that revision thereof) and release them as closed source.

Back then, legal department(s) did not have thorough understanding of the GNU license, much less BSD license and err'd on the side of caution.

Management wasn't innovative enough to move forward. Business model was geared on large scale, high-ROI, and high profit: only large business customers (and at the mercy of a handful of large business customers). Pity, for a 100K of development, one could have garnered name-brand recognition and spawn untold low-cost mini-DSLAMs for Bell-uncharted neighborhoods.

Can't fault them for their decision. Perhaps a strong undercurrent and loyal following is missing from their mantra.

Linux (and FreeBSD) user-base is a force to reckon with and was ignored completely here.

Re:Not Efficient Networks

[Malc]

Ethernet DSL modems has been and continues to be the only sane way to go. Besides better driver support, they're much more flexible and definitely worth the premium.

Conexant

[InodoroPereyra]

Conexant are helping the development of linux drivers for winmodems based in both the conexant HCF and HSF chipsets. The current beta version for the HCF is running happily in my desktop at home :-)

midiman/m-audio

[ChannelX]

The M-Audio Delta series of 24bit audio cards have linux drivers. very nice audio boards.

Re:midiman/m-audio

[David Greene]

In my experience, Midiman has not been helpful. I once asked for specs for one of their old parport MIDI interfaces. No dice. They argued with the tired old "trade secret" line. How many ways can one interface to MIDI through the parallel port? I'll not buy from them again.

BusLogic (Mylex)

[MoNsTeR]

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

Re:BusLogic (Mylex)

[Kether]

Mylex was bought by IBM.

They do not produce their own drivers, but do help the guy who's writing them.

Here's one:

[Dead Penis Bird]

Torque.net develops their own drivers, usually with the help of reverse-engineering.

Promise = Average

[joebp]

I couple of months back, I was making a 320GB network backup server for my house. The Promise Ultra133 TX2 supported both drives larger than 137GB and Linux (as advertised).

So, I went ahead and bought the card and two Maxtor 160GB drives. They didn't work with a basic Mandrake install. At this point I emailed Promise tech support. A couple of kernel options (found by searching Google groups) added to lilo and... It recognised the drives as 128GB. Great.

As it turned out, Mandrake 8.1's kernel doesn't support drives larger than 128GB, but a new kernel later and they were working to full capacity.

A whole week later, I got a reply from Promise tech support suggesting the kernel options I had used.

The moral of the story is: Linux support means it will work, but perhaps at reduced functionality.

And, of course, having documentation available online is kind of useful.

Lynksys

[Technician]

The 3 port standalone print server has excellent drivers and docs. They didn't write the drivers, and do not claim to support them, but they did an excellent job of finding them and including them on the CD. The software is provided as-is as they state they don't support it. They do provide docs on server interface and how to connect and configure it. You can even FTP a print job to an attached printer.
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....

[CDWert]

I would say NVIDIA for one, people complain constantly about closed specs etc.

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....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember, they run hot and cold.. it's a gamble.

Works really well for one guy.
crashes every 20 mins for the next

I appreciate their support, but I've been bitten

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[doob]

I have to agree here. I was in the market for a new graphics card a while back and I briefly considered an ATI card from a moral standpoint (open source etc.), only to find that their drivers hardly support any of the features of the more recent cards.

The NVidia drivers may be closed source, but they are almost as fully featured as the Windows ones, The only graphics related problem I've had seems to be related to the Athlon/AGP thing, i.e. using the card in AGP mode causes X to lock up almost instantly, but even not in AGP mode, it's still faster in Linux than Windows :)

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

I don't quite follow your argument. Yes, it's good that they've provided binary drivers - better than nothing, right? And they do seem to keep them up to date.

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.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

We now see the error of our 'trying to make a profit, whilst still giving something back to those nice linux folks' attitude.

Rest assured, we will be removing our drivers from public circulation, and posting all of our IP in Microsoft word format so all you Linux types can read it under your warezed version of office XP.

Thanks again, Nvidia.

P.S. Your feedback is appreciated, it has been filed under 'tosser'.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[lactose99]

IIRC, they *CAN'T* open their driver source for licensing reasons. I believe the NVIDIA drivers borrow (read license) code from SGI for their OpenGL support, and it is against the SGI license for NVIDIA to opensource the drivers.

Hence the reason why we have some nice binary drivers, but no source code to go with it. Have a look at the FreeBSD NVIDIA driver initiative FAQ page for more information regarding this matter.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[CDWert]

My argument is be friggin gratefull for what they give you. That is drivers that work under most normal circumstances. Dual Dual Head cards under Linux is NOT a normal situation.

Their windows drivers arent perfect either, noones are.

Sure they sould give away core information that they have spent 10 of millions of dollars in R&D , and by giving that information to write drivers for an OS that accounts for less than 3 percent of their sales, (and Im bettign your circumstance is less tha 1 in 100k)on just for the guy running Linux and Dual Dual head cards.....Oh and dont forget the information they have just given can be used quite readily by a compeetitor to clone or improve their product ?

Hardware compaines are NOT software companies, there are different forces at work in the "OpenSourcing" of hardware. Hell some of it is even covered by patents Nvidia dosent own and liscences, they are not ALLOWED to release those details, and quite frankly without some of them , the rest is pretty useless....

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[vidarh]

You got it the wrong way around. THEY should be friggin grateful that Linux users put up with their binary drivers. I for one will NOT buy a graphics card with an NVIDIA chipset the next time I upgrade unless they give out specs or open source their drivers.

I've tried practically every release of their driver, and followed practically every tip out there, but fact is my machine still crashes at least a couple of times a day whenever I use the Nvidia drivers vs. never if I use the open source drivers.

Maybe it works for most people, but it doesn't work on my machine, an I'll vote with my money and take my business elsewhere.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[amorsen]

I believe the NVIDIA drivers borrow (read license) code from SGI for their OpenGL support, and it is against the SGI license for NVIDIA to opensource the drivers.

SGI has publically denied this. They encourage nVidia to open source their drivers, but nVidia has so far refused. I am tired of people blaming SGI, it is not their fault.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[Kynde]

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....

Sources for the kernel module, period. They could keep their userspace part of the driver as closed as they'd want, but the part that gets loaded to the kernel space should, without questions nor excuses, be open source. Doesnt have to GPL, but open, so that kernel developers can see what it does and take action into stabilizing it.

There just simply aren't any excuses for keeping their driver binary-only. The only ones that I can come up with is either, terribly hacked-kludged-bastardized hebrew code that would only give them bad name OR fucked-up management that fails to see the benefits in opening up the code.

I'd bet for the later, being the common case in almost every company is most likely the cause of our distress.

The current situation is that kernel developers cannot do anything about it. When a kernel that's running with the NVidia module acts weird, the only party that can do anything is NVidia and quite frankly it isn't enough.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[CDWert]

"There just simply aren't any excuses for keeping their driver binary-only. The only ones that I can come up with is either, terribly hacked-kludged-bastardized hebrew code that would only give them bad name OR fucked-up management that fails to see the benefits in opening up the code."

It isnt. I hasnt been for damm near a Year now, the source is there go download it.

The source to the kernel module is open.

The userspace part is in binary only.

I think most people, and I have been wondering this for some time , since I looked through their sources. Have looked latley, or actually even know what they are looking for...

I was going to post links to the sources, but the damm Nvidia site is down (Yes they are there)from here.....If you need em email me....

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[drinkypoo]

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.

The libs should be opened. It would mean that porting the driver to other platforms would be possible. This opens up use of nvidia cards on many more platforms, and they don't even have to provide any support.

The brilliance of nvidia is at the hardware level, not the driver level. If there is anything non-obvious inside the driver (besides how to talk to their hardware) then it just means that they had to work around screwups in their hardware.

It would be far easier for them to simply give us the source to the windows driver and be done with it. Or to give us the specs for how to talk to the hardware. Of course their driver is pretty good now, and I am thankful for that, but it still doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[CDWert]

True to some extent.

But NVIDIA IS Doing pretty amazing things at a driver level, they have a unified driver architecture, speaking in common with ALL their hardware, a blah chip from last year and a supernew Ti??? speak the same to the driver. They have some other name for what I speak of, but from a driver level, having my TNT2 driver be the SAME as my Ti400 driver says something pretty spectacular about the very architecture itself. I bet ATI would love to have all the specs on it, and IM betting 10 to 1 if Nvidia released the source the would.

Re:NVIDIA For One....

[drinkypoo]

Well this is mostly a feature of nvidia supporting every direct3d and directdraw function at the hardware level. since nvidia's functions have been defining direct3d for the last couple versions, this is easier than it might sound. Everyone else's devices are, to a certain extent, forced to do things the nvidia way - either at the hardware level, in which case the driver is little more than a stub, or at the driver level, in which case performance suffers on all but the fastest CPUs.

Good to hear

[tweakt]

I just bought a bunch of new gear and built a server with the intent of setting up a 3-IDE drive RAID5 software under linux-2.4. Well as luck would have it, some wierd bug has bitten my system and I'm getting the dreaded PCI timeouts which hang the whole thing solid. I've tried a bunch of stuff and decided it isn't worth my time to try and solve.

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!).

Re:Good to hear

[akhaksho]

The 7000's are 64bit capable, but they don't require it.

Re:Good to hear

[hicktruckdriver]

They're not 64-bit only. I just installed an Escalade 7410 into a RedHat system with only 32-bit PCI; I don't get nearly the throughput, but it works splendidly.

Just don't use an Asus P4-T mobo; of all hardware incompatibilities to have, the *floppy controller* should not be the thing which keeps you from building the new whiz-bang production server!

Re:Good to hear

[Vrallis]

I have a 6200 (RAID0 use) and a 6410 (RAID5 use). I would absolutely recommend the 3Ware cards to everyone! I've never had any problems with them, and the latest kernel is always up to date with their latest driver release. The only competition out there for the 7000 series is Adaptec's 2400A, and that's only when doing RAID5.

Manufacturers may help, but...

[fruey]

In general, the support for hardware can be guesstimated:-

1. 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)
2. 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*
3. 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.

Re:Manufacturers may help, but...

[AJWM]

You seem to have a different definition of "top end".

I've seen a ton of top end stuff for which only NT (or W2K) support exists or will exist. Examples: high-end (broadcast quality) video capture/output cards from the likes of DPS or Matrox, hardware RAID cards, high-end audio cards, etc, etc. Perhaps this is "super high end" to you since these cards are typically a couple thousand dollars each. Certainly I wouldn't by them new for a Linux box (no support), but when I have a roomful of boxes with DPS Perception composite video cards that I can't migrate to Linux, it's a bit frustrating.

Re:Manufacturers may help, but...

[fruey]

Yeah well there's top end and then there's very specific hardware for broadcast quality type applications.

Linux video capture is developing apace; I know some consumer grade stuff is working OK and that support for higher end stuff is probably not too far away.

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:Watch for drivers being GPL, but not in kernel

[Wavicle]

That's a fundamental problem with monolithic kernels. Linux will continue to be rejected by the unwashed masses when adding new hardware means compiling a new kernel.

The "release often, release early" mantra is no longer used with kernel development. If your company released "Cool Hardware Thing" on March 1 and sent open source drivers for it to the community the same day, Joe Average would still not be able to use your hardware because 2.4.18 was released before then and 2.4.19 still isn't out (I don't see Joe Average being comfortable patching and recompiling his kernel). The situation is actually worse than that since Joe Average would probably have to wait for Red Hat to offer up that kernel revision it could easily take forever (or maybe the 2.4.18 kernel is available for users of 5.0 ?)

I have to admit, it's pretty slick the way windows comes up and says "Hey, I see you added some new hardware, why don't you stick in the CD the manufacturer gave you and I'll make it work".

</favorite rant>

Re:Watch for drivers being GPL, but not in kernel

[Yohahn]

I can relate to what you're saying, but in this case, the driver actually dosen't have to be compiled into the kernel, and that's what I think will confuse the customers.

They are used to plugging in any device and already having the driver on their system (unless it indeed is a device like what you are describing.. where you need to download a binary module or something of the like).

I fear that when we have our "firmware download script" available for our usb device.. that users will be asking millions of questions, because they've never had to do this for a device before.

(the instructions I'm refereing to are at the bottom of http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/?selected=usb )

Some kind of standard (non distrabution specific) repository or packaging shuold be used for this kinda thing.

Best Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the best solution is to build a video card from scratch. That way you're sure to know the specs.

I just finished one I call the "Clicker". I called it that because I built it out of relays instead of solid state electronings. It's very loud. And slow. And takes up half the house.

Re:Best Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I like your approach and I think we could improve on it by using MOSIS in a shared foundry run, and get a graphics chip for a couple thousand (which we get someone else to pay for....) This will also protect us from the coming M$ monopoly over television--they have locked up both ATI and NVidia for DTV. I haven't actually seen the terms, but the paranoid side of me says that M$ will require ATI and NVidia to require their video cards to not run GPL'd software. (Either I've becomore paranoid or I didn't get enough sleep. Time for a Dew.) Please inform Kollar-Kotelly (sp?).

Re:I'm only interested

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says IT men are? I am in IT, and I would love it if some girl actually understood what I am doing and gave me creative inputs on what I should do.

Everyone needs a little direction, especially myself.

Oops

[tweakt]

Looks like "hit and miss" is missing an ;-)

SANGOMA

[snubber1]

Sangoma is a excellent company to work with when it comes to linux-related issues. They make internal T-1 CSU/DSU router cards that can save a company a bundle.

They produced the drivers themselves, and therefore know them inside and out when you need support. I've even had them offer to log into the box I was working on and set things up for me (granted if the t-1 is your only connection thats kind of impossible!)

Re:SANGOMA

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Sangoma's support is truly outstanding. And not only do they support Linux, but they also support FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I set up a kickass OpenBSD border box using their T1 cards. Every time I call their support line, I end up talking to one of the actual guys who writes the drivers, and they've given me fixes the same day.

Here is a link to the linux section of their site:

http://www.sangoma.com/wanpipe_linux/wanpipe_lin ux _main.htm

no this isn't a plug or spam, just giving credit where it's due.

Re:SANGOMA

[Anonymous Coward]

Sangoma has been wonderful to deal with. We have two of their S5142 PCI cards in a RedHat box connected to 4 external CSU/DSUs (connected to 4 T1's) doing frame relay. The 4 wan interfaces are bound to teql for load balancing.

The cards have performed flawlessly, and the load on an 800Mhz Pentium III is quite low. They beat the heck out of our former Cisco 4000-M. If we ever need more CPU, we can yank the cards out and put them in a faster machine for less money and hassel than buying a new router. Besides, we have all of the flexibility of iptables, whatever traffic monitoring we want to do and anything else that you can do with a full-blown operating system.

The few times that we have contacted Sangoma, we have always talked to or received email from someone who knew what was going on, not a technodroid. The driver installation is automated and straightforward. It helps if you know something about frame relay so that you can configure the interfaces correctly. Other protocols, such as PPP and even bridging, are available as well.

HP

[ruckc]

HP has always been nice to the linux community, they have this nice Sourceforge project for their printer drivers. Its a real shame though that I bought their cheapest (stupid move) laser printer a few months back and it doesn't like linux (Only supports PCL not PostScript).

Re:HP

[iCharles]

With respect to the Enterprise market, HP is really making a push in the Linux market. They regard it as one of the three primary OSes for their high-end Itanium systems (Win64 and HP-UX are the other two), and are integrating it into their managemnet and partitioning tools. Further, APIs and other software has been created to improve interoperitability between HP-UX and Linux, so that software for one will work on both with minimal effort. Finally, the new "Blade" currently only support Linux (though they are planning to support Windows in the future).

Re:HP

[CJ Hooknose]

I bought their cheapest (stupid move) laser printer a few months back and it doesn't like linux (Only supports PCL not PostScript).

? 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 , entering your printer's model# into the search box, and following the directions.

Re:HP

[gruntvald]

I bought an LH4 (Quad CPU, dual RAID array) and it was certified for RH 6.2. Worked like a champ. However, it is simply incapable of running the 2.4 kernel supplied with RH 7.2 - 2.2 was superb. Before I go ahead and really dick with a custom kernel, on this production machine, is there anyone out there who's running 2.4 successfully on one of these beasts? Or *BSD ?

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), 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. 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:Wireless cards

[David Price]

Also, for that card, it's worth the money for the dial-a-power feature: right now, i'm about six feet from the base station, so I'm transmitting at 1mW and saving battery. When I want to do something interesting (like pull into the parking lot of a wireless-covered building in order to check something online from my car), I can crank it up to 100. It's fun.

AdvanSys

[Tet]

Now part of ConnectCom, and marketed under the "AdvanSys by Initio" brand. Not only is the advansys driver in the kernel written and actively maintained by the company, but it's superb quality, as well. By far the best SCSI controller I've used under Linux, and I can't recommend them highly enough.

My experience with hardware and Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Canon doesn't provide support, specs, or anything. (I have a Canon multifunction printer/fax.) Avoid Canon.

Sony is a disaster. (I am stupid enough to have bought a Sony Superstation backup tape). Avoid Sony like the plague.

DLink points to community-developed drivers, but their stuff works.

I recently bought a Dell 8100 laptop, installed Red Hat 7.2 as dual boot, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that their Lucent WinModem could be supported as a LinModem. Of course, I had to get help and compile the driver myself, but at least it isn't unsupportable.

Nvidia provided a driver for their display (where the XFree86 driver didn't seem to work). Not open-source, but it works.

Re:I'm only interested

[Anonymous Coward]

'cos usually they're fscking arrogant

Companies putting penguins on their boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

when the product doesn't actually work with Linux, yet.

Last week I went out to purchased as USB to serial converter. I picked up a Keyspan USA-19QW because it said it worked with Linux on the package. However it doesn't. The drivers are still in development, and the prior version, 19W series, do work with Linux. However I needed them to work that night.

I know they are developing the driver, but it's a little like false advertising to put the Linux penguin on the box if it doesn't work with Linux out of the box.

none of them

[xcable_hhh]

I have been using linux for about 3 or 4 years now. I have not come accross any "main stream" vender that activactly (pay coders to write drivers) for linux. The reason is that they like be f**** over by bill , and they don't care. There is no reason why Nvidia, ATI, Creative, Intel, AMD, RealTEK, Netgear, VIA, or all the others should not write drivers for linux, hell they give away the windoze dirvers anyway.

These companies need to grow some balls!!!

my 2 cents
heath

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:Adaptec, Belkin and !Creative

[Anonymous Coward]

Closed source... so binary-only, right?

What happens if you want to run it on some other platform other than x86?

How about if you're paranoid about running closed software as root on a server system?

It doesn't matter how well they document it. Without the source, you're stuck in their little world.

SysKonnect

[Anonymous Coward]

support Linux for their Gigabit ethernet cards

heh

[Trelane]

heh. I bought a Cisco Aironet 352 PCMCIA card, too. :)

Seriously, though, it's better than a lot of manufacturers (although, Cisco, you still have a ways to go!). The annoying part, though, is that I keep getting several "weird status" notices, such when rebooting or unloading the drivers. (particularly annoying is the one I get on our wireless network here, which floods the virtual consoles with "got weird status 1000" (0x1000) messages. Luckily, I could edit the driver and make it stop annoying me (actually, I named 0x1000 EV_ANNOY :)

Unfortunately, nobody knew what status 0x1000 was, and Cisco wasn't about to tell me. Crappy "proprietary" information. Sheesh. Any cisco employees (or execs) want to "accidentally" leak the info, so that I can at least enjoy about as much use of the hardware I purchased as the Windows people get? Better yet, make it a company policy to completely open the specs! Sheesh.

Re:I'm only interested [Offtopic answer to this]

[Hyperfrog]

This reply is for your question "Why are IT men so intimidated by powerful/smart women?".

I work in a company with 80% females. You don't notice it walking around though. My section head (in charge of an entire branch) is female. She is smart, suave and has a commanding presence. What we get in our office for her is respect. She is very good at her job and I can't think of anyone in our office who could do it better.

And, for the record: She isn't white, she isn't 'tall' and she isn't 'typical'. She runs the IT section that I'm in. This is my answer to your question.

I agree with you to a degree.. in general females are considered 'outsiders' in the IT world.. however, the view is changing and (for the record), most of the females who graduated in my degree (programming basis) have jobs equal to the males.

[And, as a side issue.. when people do ask off-topic questions like this, is it ok to respond to them? or is it cosidered to be 'offtopic' because it doesn't address the main topic?]

The community writing drivers is their support

[SuperguyA1]

If we want to live in a non-mono OS society it could potenitally be impossible or at least unrealistic to think that every hardware manufacturer would write drivers to every OS. The fact that the Linux community was able to write drivers means the company probably opened up their hardware specs. This in its self is a HUGE help, not only allowing LINUX drivers but *BSD, BeOS(*sigh*), Plan 9 or whatever to have drivers as well.

OT

[Anonymous Coward]

are you still at asu?

Perhaps not quite zero

[Art Popp]

I've never owned a parallel port scanner, mostly because, well, they suck. The money vs. features ratio on them is very good, but they are just too darned slow.

I have had an Astra 1200S (S for SCSI) since 600/1200 was cutting edge. In the beginning one had to fiddle about quite a bit to get Xsane working with it, but now, it and it's beefier scsi breathren work like champs.

Adaptec

[Paul the Bold]

Adaptec is very cooperative. You can find their page here. I think the aic7xxx driver in the 2.4 kernel tree was sponsored by Adaptec (i.e. they paid a guy to write it). It works very well. Here is the official page for the aic7xxx driver.

Re:Adaptec

[shlong]

Adaptec pays people to support the following products on Linux (and FreeBSD, to a lesser extent):

• SCSI HBA
  
• ASR and AAC RAID
  
• External RAID
  
• Fibre Channel (not open source, due to licensing with Agilent)
  

Re:Adaptec

[frleong]

Of course Adaptec is supportive of Linux. Linux market share in server systems is rather high and well, many servers need SCSI to operate efficiently. In fact, I am pretty confident that most (if not all) server hardware vendors support Linux (network cards, network management tools, SCSI adapters, UPS...)

Re: Adaptec

[psamuels]

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

That's a classic story of a hardware vendor being really unsupportive but finally seeing the light. Back in '98 or so, the Adaptec aic7xxx SCSI cards were horrible in Linux - they worked, sort of, but were really buggy. Why? The driver was completely reverse-engineered. So the word on the streets was, you want SCSI, you want Linux, get Buslogic or NCR.

Apparently Adaptec noticed the lack of ringing endorsements they were getting by the Linux crowd, so they put a guy on going through the Linux / FreeBSD drivers with specs in hand. Magically, the drivers improved and suddenly people started saying, you want SCSI, you want Linux, Adaptec works great. A year or two ago, Justin rewrote the aic7xxx driver again, and now it's even more solid. Way to go.

Re: Adaptec

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, when you look at the server marketshare numbers and note that Linux has a 20% share while NetWare only has a 10% share and SCO UNIX basically doesn't have a share, and NetWare and SCO are supported targets while Linux is not, it's a no brainer.

Re:Adaptec

[cobar]

For what it's worth I believe they hired one FreeBSD developer to continue supporting the drivers he wrote. Can't remember his name off the top of my head.

Re:Adaptec

[shlong]

They hired three, but we are officially paid to work on Linux. We just 'prototype' our work on FreeBSD =-)

Btw, the name that you are thinking of is Justin Gibbs.

good drivers, except for stability

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they are good drivers, if you ignore the stability issue. When I was using an NVIDIA card with their drivers, Linux crashed more than Windows did. Coincidentally, the vast majority of Windows crashes were also caused by their faulty drivers. ATI drivers for Linux are more stable than Windows drivers, since they are developed externally using the specifications that ATI actually does release.

Re:good drivers, except for stability

[jordan_a]

Are you using an AMD system? There is a known problem with AGP memory handling, try adding mem=nopentium to your kernels paramaters. Works for me :)

Re:good drivers, except for stability

[the_greywolf]

with the latest drivers, linux is 10 times as stable as windows on my machine. (i think this has something to do with my AGP controller, but i have yet to confirm this.)

i'm thinking of trying to do performance modifications to the drivers and see if i can get a higher framerate in Blender than i should.... o_O

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.

Re:Lexmark puts a Penguin on their Boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and no!

Lexmark Laser division very good support.

Lexmark Inkjet division not so good support.

I have a Z53 color inkjet. It works, it has drivers from Lexmark. Totally fubared my printing. Had to reinstall everything, cause I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
Now running gentoo1.1a (Gentoo ROX!!!)
Printing works great, but the alignment is slightly off, which is why I initially tried Lexmarks' drivers.

There may be hope for them. They just aren't quite there yet.

Re:Lexmark puts a Penguin on their Boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the linux priter site first. I got a Z42 that was pretty much a WinPrinter. It *sorta* works now, with some CUPS hackery. Definitely not 100 % supported.

PowerVR

[13Echo]

PowerVR has been making an attempt to supply closed source drivers to the Linux community. I had some problems with the first beta drivers, but they worked and were accellerated. I havne't tried the beta 2 drivers yet, but they are supposed to glue to just about any modern kernel.

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.

False statements

[jmv]

I wonder how many people have encountered the problem I have right now. I bought a Midiman Delta 1010LT, which the company claimed worked under Linux (through "third drivers", from ALSA). This was fine with me so I bought the card (which box had a nice linux sticker on it).

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

[dmnic]

I ran into the same problem with my Audiophile 2496 from M-audio....
damn bastages!

Re:False statements

[jmv]

Last time I checked, I think the Audiophile 2496 was supported by ALSA (probably a couple months after you bought it). I'm guessig that's the way they operate... They release a card and put a Linux sticker on the box that means (to them): "it would be nice is someone wrote a Linux driver for that card" and then they wait until someone finally writes a driver... Not to mention that they don't even respond to e-mail asking for the card spec sheets.

Re:False statements

[dmnic]

I purchased the card in late 2000. it stated on the box "Linux Supported" then. at the time they had Linux drivers on the driver page for the card. ALSA within Mandrake 7.2 recognized it and loaded the module, but it wouldnt work. the same happened in Mandrake 8.0-8.1, but a few months ago, M-Audio pulled the Linux driver off the driver page.
in Mandrake 8.1, I get a buffer error, but I dont know which config file I need to edit, or what value to set the buffer to once I find it.

any ideas?

Re:False statements

[jmv]

Try the latest ALSA beta (0.9.2 I think) or the ALSA CVS. I've seen the source of the driver and there seems to be all that's needed for your card. Then again, I don't know how tested the driver is.

Wacom

[Anonymous Coward]

Wacom does a good job of providing interface specs for its tablets.

Roey.

Matrox XFree86 drivers

[Broadcatch]

I have a Matrox G450 and a G200 card, both of which are nicely supported by recently upgraded Matrox drivers - including source.

Also, many IBM machines run Linux - I wish all their laptops did!

Midi-Man/M-audio

[dmnic]

on the box it used to say it supported Linux, but myself or anyone else I knew couldnt get the driver to work. ALSA regonizes and loads the module, but it wont work...M-audio finally pulled the driver off their website and they no longer "officially" support linux....
shame, its a really nice card, and I'd love to try it with Ardour.
shame that this is the only reason why my home office isnt 100% Windows free!

Re:Midi-Man/M-audio

[NFW]

I made the mistake of buying a MidiMan Midisport 8x8 without asking around first (dumb). I used it under Windows for a few weeks, can't take it back now (dumb). There is no Linux support. The interface is undocumented and inscrutable, so there probably won't be without a heroic effort. I am totally kicking myself for this (dumb) purchase. Argh.

And the icing on the cake... 1996-vintage MusicQuest 8Port/SE that this thing replaces came with much more user-friendly drivers and utilities.

An M-Audio Quattro was going to be my next purchase, but I don't think I can wait for this company to wake up and smell the Linux.

What about a sign?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't we provide supported hardware vendors a approved registered Tux-sign "100% linux compatible".

Sangoma

[jpiterak]

I don't know if any of you out there use/have need for WAN (T1/E1/DS0) cards, but support for Linux at Sangoma is absolutely phenominal.

Not only is the Linux driver developer (Nanad Corbin) an active developer for many network and WAN-related projects, but when you call for support, you often get to talk to him. All the better, bugfixes are usually out within days, and requests for features actually get implemented!

The product is a little more expensive than some alternatives, but really -- I can't rave about these guys enough...

Here's a few taken from the kernel source:

[Anonymous Coward]

drivers/scsi/ips.c

Driver for the IBM ServerRaid controllers, written by IBM.

drivers/block/cpqarray.c

Driver for the Compaq SMART2 controllers, written by Compaq.

drivers/audio/emu10k1/* -- Creative Labs..

I could go on and on, but try 'grep -r -i corporation /usr/src/linux/drivers' - I got 492 lines, but that includes lots of redundancy, of course.

Hardware certification scheme for Linux

[spamtastic2]

Does such a thing exist ? It would be great if there was a logo that manufacturers could put on their packaging that indicated that they had provided ALL information required freely to the community to develop open source drivers for its product. The logo would only be available for a manufacturer to use on the product after either a GPL source driver is released by the company, or data needed to produce a driver is released freely (no nondisclosure agreement crap) and a GPL driver is produced by the community. Flame away !

Re:Hardware certification scheme for Linux

[psamuels]

Does such a thing exist ? It would be great if there was a logo that manufacturers could put on their packaging that indicated that they had provided ALL information required freely to the community to develop open source drivers for its product.

Red Hat had a hardware cert of some sort (don't remember the name), but I wouldn't trust it. The very first (or maybe second) piece of hardware Red Hat managed to certify was an IBM laptop whose modem/sound card (the infamous mwave) didn't have any Linux support at all. And I think there were serious issues with at least one other built-in component, but it's been awhile. It really stank of Red Hat just selling the cert stamp without actually having any criteria.

(Yes, the mwave is now supported by Linux. But this was years ago - it sure wasn't supported back then.)

Re:Hardware certification scheme for Linux

[spamtastic2]

Maybe there should be a community run scheme. If nothing else, it would be a good excuse for another logo contest and another tux variant !

Ironically...

[Anonymous Coward]

All the M$ hardware I've ever used worked great in Linux. My Intellimouse Optical (the 7-buton variation) behaves itself with just a tiny button map hack. (Even when connected via USB!) Point is, while Microsoft doesn't directly support Linux drivers, they go waaaayyyy out of their way to keep their hardware compliant with the standards, making it a piece of cake to write drivers for them. They could have fscked with their ergonomic keyboards, but they made it as standard as any other keyboard on the market. I just plugged it in, and went. I'm sure their joysticks work nicely too. Oh, and it probably would be pretty easy to install Linux on the X-Box... :-)

Project UDI

[Deven]

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.

That's why we should all be supporting Project UDI (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

[4of12]

Sounds like a really good idea.

But there are two sides to an interface: the driver and the OS.

How well can UDI cope with the ferment that is the Linux kernel: things changing to make them faster, cleaner, etc.

Re:Project UDI

[twoflower]

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.

At the price of absolutely terrible performance and scalability. UDI support has been soundly rejected by Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Peter Anvin, et al every time it's been brought up.

It's not just Linux developers who think the idea sucks, either -- that's why it's not supported by other OSes as well.

Twoflower

Re:Project UDI

[AJWM]

Well, it's the old portability vs performance tradeoff.

Sure, a native driver tuned to the OS is going to give you the best performance. But a portable (eg UDI) driver is going to give you better performance than no driver, which is what you'll have if the hardware vendor hasn't chosen to support your particular platform.

Sure, I'd rather have native Linux drivers for the various gadgets I own. But some of those gadgets only ever came with Windows drivers -- I'll take a UDI driver over the no-driver-at-all that I currently have for those.

Re:Project UDI

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, not all of the arguments against UDI were technical. Basically nobody wanted to enable closed source drivers.

Re:Project UDI

[Anonymous Coward]

> To be fair, not all of the arguments against UDI were technical. Basically nobody wanted to enable closed source drivers.

There are good, technical reasons dealing with maintenance going forward for not wanting to enable closed source drivers.

Re:Project UDI

[CAIMLAS]

Urg... that's another level of abstraction I don't need. I'd take my performance on the hardware that isn't exactly my choice, over poor quality performance on the hardware I want.

I might as well use an OS written in Java... (no offense to java, but that'd suck.)

Plus, I'd think it would be more difficult to write a UDI driver that's stable and bugless than one for an OS - once again, there's a level of abstraction. Sure, though, if it could be done well (adn I doubt it could be) it would be nice to see such a thing done by manufactuers of devices (like portables, etc - not video cards and essential stuff like that. that = relaly shitty performance) so alternative OSes could have support for nice devices like that.

Re:Project UDI

[Anonymous Coward]

Support policy isn't really a technical reason. Also, as seen with discussions about open source drivers (from Intel and others) that aren't GPL-compatible, it's clearly a political issue.

Re:Project UDI

[chicks.net]

What could be better?

1. Open source drivers are better than UDI ones. The FSF has made a clear stand against UDI because of it's potential harm to free software development.
2. Real drivers are better than UDI ones. Many people are willing to overlook the performance problems to get support for more devices, but considering that we have support for most devices now, providing an easy out for those vendors who haven't given in under linux's market presense seems a waste of our efforts.
3. The kernel bloat introduced by UDI is pretty significant.

Re:Project UDI

[Deven]

But there are two sides to an interface: the driver and the OS.

How well can UDI cope with the ferment that is the Linux kernel: things changing to make them faster, cleaner, etc.

Everything OS-specific is encapsulated within the "UDI environment", which is the OS side of the UDI implementation. An environment needs to be created to allow an OS to use UDI drivers, and this might be relatively difficult to do at first, but it only needs to be done once for the OS.

When something changes in the OS requiring a change to the device drivers, that change occurs once in the UDI environment, rather than repeatedly for every relevant driver. That's the advantage of using a clean API...

Re:Project UDI

[Deven]

There are good, technical reasons dealing with maintenance going forward for not wanting to enable closed source drivers.

Could that be because so many Linux kernel changes have required mass updates of driver code to match? UDI is designed to abstract out all of that stuff into the UDI environment on the OS side. Old drivers should continue to work as well as they ever did, since the UDI interface is more stable than the Linux internals...

Re:Project UDI

[Deven]

At the price of absolutely terrible performance and scalability. UDI support has been soundly rejected by Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Peter Anvin, et al every time it's been brought up.

It doesn't seem like they've really given it a fair chance. From what I heard, they looked at it a little, decided it looked complicated (which it is) and presumed that complicated == slow (which is an unwarranted presumption), decided that the whole UDI thing was just a ploy by Intel to get Linux folks to do all their driver work for them (Intel was late to the game), and started railing against what a terrible idea UDI support was.

And, of course, once a determination like that has been made, everyone's going to be even more close-minded about evaluating it in the future, preferring to rely on their bad first impression than look closer at it.

I've heard the comment that a 5% loss in performance would be so terrible that it wouldn't be worth using UDI if it made things that "slow". Nevermind that native drivers could run alongside UDI drivers in the cases where performance really matters that much...

According to the UDI developers, they're getting equal or better performance on Unixware compared to native drivers, despite the extra overhead of layering the UDI environment on top of those same native drivers! It should be possible to make a more efficient implementation that is faster yet. The UDI design always had performance and scalability in mind.

It's not just Linux developers who think the idea sucks, either -- that's why it's not supported by other OSes as well.

Stop the presses! People don't want to chuck out legacy interfaces and have to learn something new? Who could have imagined that would happen?

Of course UDI has an adoption problem. Everyone wants to keep doing things the way that's always worked for them, regardless of what's best for themselves and the industry in the long run.

UDI offers 100% portability from one OS to the next. Plenty of Linux users have complained bitterly when no Linux driver is available for their hardware -- you think they wouldn't be happy with a working driver, even if it's a little slower than a native driver might be? Yes, we're starting to see some native Linux drivers written by hardware vendors, but more often they expect the Linux community to do the actual work anyhow.

What about other alternative operating systems? If every Linux driver was available as a UDI driver, those drivers could be used on FreeBSD, BeOS, GNU HURD, or any other operating system -- just write a UDI environment for that OS once and all the UDI drivers suddenly become available. Richard Stallman should jump at this, but instead he decided it was a ploy by Intel to leech free driver efforts from free software developers. Why should those developers waste time porting each driver to each OS? What a waste of talent!

Linux is in a stronger position than it used to be; hardware driver support isn't as comprehensive as for Windows, but it's probably #2 now. That doesn't really help HURD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BeOS, and every other alternative OS out there, and the closed-source Linux drivers out there couldn't even be ported. UDI drivers could run unmodified across a range of OS platforms.

UDI also offers many safety and security benefits that native Linux drivers don't have. Misbehaving UDI drivers could be killed and restarted by the OS without harming the system, if the environment implements such protections -- the drivers could even be implemented in user mode if desired. Hardware drivers are often blamed for system crashes, especially on Windows -- wouldn't it be great to be able to protect the system from any drivers which couldn't be trusted not to misbehave? (Performance-critical drivers could be configured not to be protected as much.)

There are a lot of good reasons to support UDI, and the main objections (performance, scalability, etc.) all seem to be based more on perception than actual experience with UDI. That's unfortunate, because the potential benefits are enormous, and everyone is too busy dismissing the idea out of hand to even try to make it work.

Don't we all know what it's like to be the underdogs in terms of hardware support? Many other alternative OS users are much worse off than Linux users in this. Must we forever have this morass of legacy driver interfaces and eschew fundamental advancements in the state of the art? (UDI is a clear advancement, at least in interoperability, and possibly in design as well.)

There's some pretty sharp people working on the Linux kernel. I bet they could make some highly efficient UDI implementations, if they wanted to. The design always had performance in mind (zero copy, DMA, etc.) but the prototypes and reference implementation were never highly performance-oriented. The portability of UDI has been proven, and even without a focus on performance, they've been able to rival the performance of native drivers. Imagine what the Linux kernel hackers could do if they did focus on performance in a UDI implementation?

Re:Project UDI

[alext]

I might as well use an OS written in Java... (no offense to java, but that'd suck.)

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?

BEST DATA makes good modems...

[Anonymous Coward]

Best Data, which is sold in Comp USA, makes an external serial modem which is designed to work fine with Linux. It's actually a *real* modem rather than a winmodem. It's one of the last available, I suspect... I haven't seen any others around. Under a hundred bucks, too. ;)

LinkSys is a big one

[d3xt3r]

LinkSys actively supports Linux by releasing Linux drivers all of their network cards. Their support page also gives plenty of attetion to Linux as well as *BSD.

Another nice thing about LinkSys is that they make sure their routers/firewalls/vpn products are OS agnostic. All of their products work with Linux and can be configured through any web browser, not just IE -- even their low-end, in-home use intended products. I consider that noteworthy and I support them by using their products.

Also, Linksys just came out with a nice home router/VPN that works as a VPN client. That means that with any OS you can establish an outbound VPN client connection. I think that's great, especially since it's a consumer level appliance (like $150 or something). I'm thinking about buying one. :)

Oh, and SanDisk is another. Their web-site explicity points out which card readers are Linux-supported and which are not.

So yes, I think we are starting to see some good commercial support for Linux in the hardware division, with these and all the other posts.

Griffin Tech.

[Anonymous Coward]

Griffin Technologies is a (Tenn. based?) company that manufactures macintosh-related accessories. I bought one of their USB-to-ADB adaptors (just for fun, really). I decided to write a linux driver for it. I emailed the company, and within a *day* I had the complete specs for the protocol. While they didn't write the driver themselves, they were very supportive, and answered all my questions (which is really the most you can hope for, given linux's market share). Anyway, the driver isn't complete yet, but if you want to take a look, here's my web site:
my site

SBE (was LMC) WAN cards

[drxyzzy]

SBE makes T1/E1 and T3 PCI WAN interfaces with integrated CSU. Driver source is available for Linux and all three BSDs.

The Good and The Bad

[treczoks]

The Good, in my opinion:
AVM (Active and passive ISDN cards)
Digital Equipment (DE4x5 drivers)

The Bad:
Canon ("We will not support Linux, we will not give specs for writing drivers")
UMAX (Cheap scanners)

Re:Promise = Average (make that Bad)

[Alea]

My experience with Promise is considerably worse. I have the FastTrak100 TX2 and as far as I can tell, the drivers they provide will only work with the original Redhat 7.1 kernel (not the upgraded kernels). In any event, I submitted two "problem reports" to Promise, one in October 2001, another in January 2002. No reponse. I directly emailed their support group in February. Still no response.

I wrote civil messages, carefully explaining that I wasn't compiling up my own kernels but using the official RedHat kernels, so I don't think they can be excused on the grounds that I'm outside a reasonable support area. They didn't even have the decency to answer!

Now I'm stuck with a useless card (the open source driver doesn't support mirroring) that I bought because they claimed to support Linux.

Re:UMAX a second

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, bail that wussy scsi crud card and slap in even an old Adaptec. I have a SCSI UMAX and have found that it works very well under Linux. Gotta love SCSI! Always buy strong sound technologies, not the cheap cluster f00k winjunk. Remember the Winmodems? I wouldn't wipe with em, and I'm not say'n that just cause the metal pins poke'n out the bottom.

Version incompatibility

[matze235]

I believe that one of the reasons why there aren't more Linux drivers is that drivers are incompatible with every new kernel release, so binary-only drivers don't make much sense. And binary-only drivers are the only way most vendors want to publish their drivers.

Video Cards

[sloanster]

Interestingly enough, I find that Nvidia provides not only the best video cards, but the best driver support for linux of any vendor - it's no contest.

While some may prefer that the nvidia drivers were open source, you can't argue with the results, and to me the most important thing is the quality - and nvidia has demonstrated that. If you look on their site, their are up-to-date, conveniently packaged binary and source rpms specifically for every major linux distro, or tarballs should you prefer that.

If there's ever been another vendor who even came close to that level of support I'd like to know about it.

Dell, sort of :)

[d3xt3r]

Seriously, all the hardware in Dell laptops and desktops is designed to support Linux.

This may be a bit off topic since it's not hardware components but I still think it's relevant.

When I ordered my Dell I wanted linux on it but the sales rep said i needed to get one w/Windows (M$ Tax) but would put me in touch with a tech person about Linux support. That person informed me that Dell insures that all hardware used in their Laptops is 100% linux compatible with linux and I would have no trouble setting it up.

So i got the laptop and he was right! Installed SuSE linux on it and everything works great. Sound, suspend to disk, suspend to ram, ethernet, etc.

Two gripes though: 1. the M$ tax 2. removing the OEM installed OS from the hard disk voids the warranty. 2 is not really a problem though for 2 reasons. First, you can shrink down the Win partition to 2 GB and put linux on the rest and not void the warranty. Second, the company I work for has had to have repair work done on Dell laptops in the past, and they always tell you to remove the battery and hard drive before returning it for service. So really, they'd never know what the hell you were running on it anyway. :-) THis not removing the OEM installed OS bullshit is probably just so they don't get in trouble from their best buddy MS for people installing pirated windoze versions and so dell doesn't have to support morons who try to upgrade their os from windoze ME to XP and call telling Dell that things stopped working.

ST Microelectronics does!

[Michael_Jarvis]

The Imaging and Display Division of ST Microelectronics (formerly VLSI Vision Ltd) makes the chipset for the CPiA-based webcam as well as the upcoming CPiA2 chipset.

I'm not sure about the original CPiA project, but with the CPiA2 chipset Linux driver ST Micro provided the intial driver source (ported from their Windows driver), and they have a staff developer on the open-source team. Of course the CPiA2 code is still a work in progress.

Thanks -

[wirefarm]

That's exactly the sort of answer I was looking for when I posed the question.
When I asked it, it was not "What works well under Linux" or even "Who makes drivers available" but "Who really stands out in their support of the Linux community."

At this point, I've pretty much got all the hardware I need, most of it working under Linux, now it's down to where should I go to upgrade and who do I recommend to friends?

I've had great luck with Adaptec - they make great stuff and I never had to give the drivers a thought - I just never knew that Adaptec was throwing so much support behind their product.

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

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:NDAs, DMCA, etc..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re the NDA's. Why not just have a click-wrap NDA for each person who downloads? :-D

more points for 3com

[YetAnotherDave]

I have 3com 100Mb/s cards in a few machines at work. The driver CDs came with windoze binaries, and linux source. Very stable, too.

Re:more points for 3com

[YetAnotherDave]

Sorry, that should read '1000Mb/s'

100Mb isn't really newsworthy, is it :)

sx-6000

[Openadvocate]

I have a sx-6000 controller I run as RAID-5 and it seems to work for me, except that I got that large drive problem too. Anyway, I selected "Other"(instead of Linux) in the controller setup and Redhat found it as a I2O device, Mandrake however did not in the 8.1 release.

Re:sx-6000

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent two weeks wrestling with an SX6000, and in the end had to shelve the box of parts. Promise was unwilling or unable to tell me what motherboards they supported, and it became evident my piece of crap Shuttle AI61 was the issue. I won't touch this card again until I can get somebody at Promise to walk into their lab, find a linux box with this card running, and read the motherboard make and model to me.

They do write their own drivers, to speak to the original post's question, and the quality is mixed. The documentation is poor, with lots of Engrish.

They do appear to be making a good effort, though. The install scripts do all the right things: configuiring an initrd image, being aware of grub and lilo, and decent heuristics.

Software modem manufacturer support

[Fluffy the Cat]

IBM have a driver for their MWave software modems in the main kernel tree. PCTel have an open driver for theirs, too. Conexant are actively supporting the development of drivers for their HCF and HSF chipsets. Lucent, on the other hand, have an unofficial binary driver that seems quite happy to crash.

My list...

[OneFix]

Well, for video...no contest, it's nVidia...

Which incidently, the RivaTV Project had a recent breakthrough which means most of the cards with TV-IN are now working.

Printers...HP...

Scanners...Epson...

What really sucks is I have an Optrox scanner...some will know, this company went out of business a while back, and there seems to be no specs available for it.

What I would really like to know is if anyone knows how one would go about getting specs for hardware produced by a long dead company...

PCI/ISA Modems...
They are kind of standardized...unless you're talking about a softmodem of some sort...which you should steer away from anyhow...

NICs...3com...

However, I suggest RealTek based cards because they are so cheap in comparison and seem to have good support.

Sound...Creative...

Linux Media Labs

[AJWM]

This company designs and manufactures its own video capture and compression cards, and also remarkets some third-party cards. All supported under Linux (with a name like that, what else?) and they GPL the drivers.

Pretty cool.

PowerVR Kyro drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so it's out there PowerVR *finally* released some beta Kyro drivers at the end of February. They're still betas, but they do appear to be actively developed; Xvideo is planned for the next released, which will be pretty sweet. :-)

This affects some Hercules owners, and I think the Kyro chip has been used on some motherboards as well.

Lexmark

[creff]

Lexmark used to have a page dedicated to their printers that have linux drivers for them. I am having trouble finding it now, but you can find linux drivers for many of their printers through each product's driver page.

Re:Lexmark

[waferhead]

Yep. Lexmark printers even have some pretty GUI maintenance functions specifically for several models on Mandrake 8.2...Maybe 8.1 too, can't remember.

Midimans

[Anonymous Coward]

sound-drivers for their delta-cards. Open source
high-quality drivers for alsa.

Open specs vs. closed source drivers (was Re:ATI)

[fetta]

"I'd rather have that than specs and a driver development effort that can't keep up."

While I agree that we shouldn't "dis" NVIDIA for supporting us in a less than optimial way, we should still politely encourage companies to embrace open source, not just Linux, for practical reasons.

Ask anybody who tries to use older hardware, especially from companies that don't exist anymore. Think Aureal soundcards, for example. The folks at aureal.sourceforge.net make a valiant effort to support hardware from a bankrupt company, but are constantly hampered by insufficient information.

Ideally, hardware vendors would supply both specs and their own Linux drivers.

• The company then gets to benefit from the developer community.
• The "common folk" benefit from knowing that if the company chooses not to continue supporting a particular piece of hardware that they won't be left out in the cold.

Philips Don't care about Linux at all

[jmcgarey]

They have some 'mega great award winning' sound cards
like the acoustic edge.
but they have NO current or intended linux support. Others have recieved replies from them on this matter, claiming that they dont intend to ever support linux. go with Creative instead.

ActionTec

[Anonymous Coward]

ActionTec was the first vendor I ever saw that put the words "Supports Linux" on a box. They still sell ADSL kit and analog modems that work with Linux. I've had my ActionTec PCI modem over a year and still very happy with it.

HP LH4

[gruntvald]

Has anyone gotten a 2.4 kernel correctly working on one of these? 2.2 was fine. How about *bsd?

NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[FreeUser]

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.

Well, perhaps ... but NVIDIA's closed source drivers, while good in some respects, do occasionally cause X to hang for no apparant reason. Switching NVIDIA cards, or updating to the current drivers, does nothing to alleviate this, although switching from an NVIDIA card to an ATI Radeon card did solve the problem, as did using the Free Software Nvidia X driver ('nv') with the same hardware that was so troublesome with the 'nvidia' driver. And yes, this is with AGP settings in the safest, most conservative mode (cf the NVIDIA driver docs for details).

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

[vidarh]

I'd second this. My next graphics card will most certainly NOT be an NVIDIA based one. I can live with somewhat lower performance, but not with having my machine crashing all the time.

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[Afrosheen]

You must have some hardware issues that are agp related or something else. I've had a geforce2 mx for months now and have used all of the nvidia drivers on mandrake (even through 4 beta releases of 8.2) and never had ONE freeze. Don't spread FUD based on your personal experience with shite/buggered hardware.

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[T3kno]

Amen to this, I've been using nvidia cards for years, and have not had that many problems with them. KDE freezes my machine more than the nvidia drivers (properly configured of course).

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[dinivin]

Believe it or not, moron, a lot of people have had lockup problems with nVidia's drivers.

Just because you haven't had those problems doesn't mean that what he posted was FUD.

Dinivin

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[harakh]

If you're not into gaming - give Matrox a try. they arent super-fast in 3D but they are awesome for workstation usage and desktop usage. Drivers for atleast my G-400 are extremely good. Dualhead is nice aswell - once you try two screens you'll never want to go back...

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[dvNull]

Why are you calling him a moron ? Agreed, Older version have had problems but for over the past year I havent had ONE problem with an Nvidia card in my Linux machines and thats also because I buy quality hardware.

I know people who have bought the $99 GeForce2Mx special made by noname corp and that causes problems in Windows and Linux. My PNY GeForce3 and Hercules GeForce2Mx hasnt had a SINGLE problem, though my IOMagic TNT2 M64 before that locked up consistently ..

dvNuLL

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[dinivin]

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:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[Dwonis]

Don't get a G550 (or probably a G450, for that matter) -- the drivers are much crappier (from my perspective, they weren't too much better than nVidia's drivers).

Re:NVidia's closed source drivers cause problems

[FreeUser]

hy 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?!?

Actually, the binary NVidia drivers cause problems on a lot of systems. I have 20-odd systems at work with various NVidia drivers and hardware, running X in various configurations (some dual headed, some single headed, some PCI cards, some AGP, various processors, various versions of X, etc.).

They all suffer from these kind of stability issues, sufficiently often that those which are not using the dual-head features of the cards have been switched to using the free 'nv' driver, which lacks many of the features of the closed-source drivers but are significantly more stable and reliable.

For the rest, we are no longer purchasing NVidia cards because of the stability issues, and are migrating toward ATI and other solutions. Binary-only, proprietary drivers simply entail unnacceptable risks in stability, and leave our hands tied when problems arise.

The NVidia fans can complain, accuse myself and my predicessors of incompetence (they were not incompetent and neither am I, but that is neither here nor there), claim there are 'AGP' issues even on PCI-only systems, etc. etc., but when all is said and done, removing NVidia's binary-only drivers and replacing them with the free 'nv' drivers, or replacing the hardware with ATI hardware and its respective free drivers, turns the machine from a flakey box reminisicent of Windows stability to a rock solid, reliable workhorse with uptimes measured in the hundreds of days.

There should be a "Linux Friendly" award...

[maroberts]

..with varying grades to hardware manufacturers, combined with a logo that can be placed on packaging. Say a Linux Friendly logo, with awards for a product ranging from bronze to platinum, depending on how much the manufacturer supports Linux.

I have problems

[Sits]

Even with the latest release (with the mem=nopentinum option) I can't run all the gl xscreensavers like cage and mobious (which work with older drivers). In fact 2D DGA acceleration with UAE crashes the entire machine which doesn't happen with the default nv module.

However, I'm glad that I they release the closed source binary drivers because they are much faster than anything else out there. Would that be the case if they gave people the specs? I don't know (I can't hack that code but others might).

However, in saying you don't care that the drivers are closed you are taking a very shortsighted view of things. What about BSD (will Nvidia support or won't they)? What about if Nvidia decide to stop supporting linux in the future because they don't consider it viable (and then XFree86 5 comes out)?

Also anyone who has been using them and has a problem will never have a kernel bug report looked at seriously (I know :) and I've tried sending mail about bugs shown by gears in earlier drivers (long before the nopentium business) and I've never heard anything back...

I do as well...

[mbrod]

Especially IBM laptops.

Been running various flavors of Debian (stable, testing, unstable), most of the 2.4 kernel series, using KDE, and never have had any problems on my IBM laptop with it.

Just wanted to give props to IBM where it was due.

Linksys support

[Eagle5596]

I've actually found that Linksys has very good support for Linux with their products, the most notable example would have to be their PCMCIA Ethernet card (Model EC2T) which has worked absolutely flawlessly for me, with no hassle. In contrast, I have only been able to get the same card to work correctly under windows about 20% of the time. Go figure, made for windows but works for Linux.

As far as printers go, I unfortunatly haven't had much luck with Lexmark (my choice brand), while I can get their printers to work, I've had trouble enabling color support (for the Z51), which is a large detractor. The lab I work in has had a lot of luck with HP's however (laser models).

Lexmark

[vidarh]

I thought I'd never say this, but Lexmark actually seems to be getting quite Linux friendly. They specifically list Linux on several of their websites for a reasonable subset of their printers, and have drivers available for downloads...

It's not more than a year or two ago that I had to return a Lexmark printer because I couldn't get it to work with Linux at all.

Cisco does.

[Mordant]

http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/airone t-utils-linux

Creative Labs drivers are junk

[Anonymous Coward]

They get a bunch of CS people to program their drivers that don't know how to properly develop drivers from experience. I worked with a guy who was a developer at Creative and he said it was one of the worst shops he had been in. Although since it is in Stillwater Oklahoma what do you expect?

Re:Creative Labs drivers are junk

[Anonymous Coward]

>Although since it is in Stillwater Oklahoma what >do you expect?

Actually, the drivers are not developed in Stillwater, OK. They are developed in singapore. The only programmers in Stillwater are internal applications programmers, web developers, and (the guy you probably worked with) a developers support person who mainly deals with helping application developers get sound working in their applications.

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?

Linux isn't a priority.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a hardware developer myself, I have considered developing software support for *nix. The problem I encounter is that between the Windows platform and the Linux platform, windows seems to give me more to work with.

In terms of my linux skill, I'm pratically a newbie. I still can't install a piece of software via 600 .gz files. (I get to that 300th and get bored.)

Overall its the big thing that Windows has on linux. Windows seems more standardized like a rock. It just sits there. I see a new linux kernel every other day, leaving me to wonder when I'd have time to actually use it vs. upgrading.

The product I'm working on, would enjoy benefit from Linux users. But the problem boils down to the fact that I have yet to find a solid foundation of documentation on the topic. (Wiriting linux drivers.)

If you guys really want hardware support, start building a squirrel-killer text on the subject.
Also, if you think about it practically, no real market research has been done on Linux as being a viable platform for hardware. In my experience, most vendors just see you guys as a little hobbiest group and are nothing of consequence.

For those of you who are experienced with the kernel end of things, perhapse you could reply with some useful info on where to start for Linux Driver Development.

(To have a vendor feel that providing a spec is nessesary, you'll be needing to show them what their device will need to work with.)

Re:Linux isn't a priority.

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing drivers is a helluva lot more easier in Linux than Windows. I think you'll find the Linux driver model is much less convoluted than VxDs and the new and overly complicated and thoroughly convoluted WDM. See here for details.

Re:Linux isn't a priority.

[korgull]

But, it's a bit scary that you always need the support from your hardware vendor to support your windows version.
Recently lots of people try to use windowsXP and just find out there are no drivers for their hardware.
Does microsoft really believe that users would chuck away their nice $1000 scanner just because it's not supported by XP? So, windows basically has the same problems as linux does.
The only advantage that you would have with open source is that you can easily upgrade a driver to work with a new driver interface (for example from 2.2 to 2.4 kernel). With MSWindows you'll just have to wait, even though you would be able to do this part of programming yourself.

The thing I don't get about many hardware vendors is that providing information to the open-source community won't cost them (hardly) any money. Their in-house software engineer does cost them money. Why don't they use this opportunity ?
It seems they often misjudge what is confidential information.

Start with the linux device driver guide !

Re:Linux isn't a priority.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you made a few points. These points were made of platinum apperantly.

So where would you suggest to start for getting some Linux development support going?

"Secret technology assets" are mostly illusion

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry... what they give me? I was under the impression that I had to buy the cards from them, and was therefore entitled to have an opinion about what constituted decent support... and appropriate support for Windows is not necessarily the same as appropriate support for Linux. It's true that small market segments are often ignored, and justifiably so, but that does't mean that the people in those segments aren't entitled to notice that the support they get is substandard.

Now, about specs.

I've been in this game long enough to remember when buying a card generally got you a complete block diagram, a breakdown of all the registers and commands, and frequently a set of schematics. Every customer got them, no NDAs involved. Oddly enough, we didn't see a lot of cloning going on; in fact, the big problem was that no two things were alike.

Nifty Ideas and Secret Innovations are way overhyped. It feeds people's egos, and makes management feel good, to think that they have Unique Intellectual Property Assets. That sort of thinking has become such a religion that it's financially self-fulfilling; to get capital, you have to show that you have special assets. People want to think that specific, simple ideas are those assets.

The fact, however, is that that's mostly bullshit. For 95 (maybe more like 99.5) percent of the ideas out there, a competent designer will come up with either the same idea or something just as good without a lot of effort. The barriers to entry are the detailed design, the tooling, the supply chain, the distribution, and the rest of the organizational support for the product. Those are the real assets. The hard part is the long, complex grunt work of execution, not the "flash of genius".

Obviously, that's not universal. There are genuinely valuable "flashes of genius". However, those very seldom remain secret for very long. Companies have far fewer real secrets than they think they have. Especially technical secrets.

As for patents, they are allowed to release those details. In fact, the whole point of a patent is to give a monopoly in exchange for public disclosure of how something works. There is no such thing as a secret patented technology. There may be other people's trade secrets buried in there, and it's conceivable that a detailed interface spec would disclose those trade secrets. But it's very unlikely.

Anyhow, you're overhyping the amount of useful reverse engineering information in an interface spec. There's some there, but it's a pretty trivial portion of the amount of work in cloning something. Admittedly every little bit helps, but we're not talking about a large effect.

Re:"Secret technology assets" are mostly illusion

[CDWert]

Well....Here goes one last time....

The fact, however, is that that's mostly bullshit. For 95 (maybe more like 99.5) percent of the ideas out there, a competent designer"

I agree 100% with that, but the problem isnt the 99% its the 1% that they are afraid and rightfully so, of releasing.

"As for patents, they are allowed to release those details. In fact, the whole point of a patent is to give a monopoly in exchange for public disclosure of how something works."

True BUT, my point was actully the IMPLEMENTAION of theose patents, some of which are covered as Trade Secrets, and there are NDA's to given implementations, a patent doesent have to give you the process leading to the implmentation of something. You can patent a chemical WITHOUT releasing the manufacture method.

I guess the singly most important statement you made is "It's true that small market segments are often ignored, and justifiably so, but that does't mean that the people in those segments aren't entitled to notice that the support they get is substandard."

The truth is FOR THIS GIVEN MARKET SEGMENT, their support is not substandard, it may in your eyes be substandard to windows support, but as 3d accells on Linux go its far from substandard. Dont even bark about the ATI stuff, its crap up toll the last gen and they dont release ALL of the details of what they have released in the last 6 months in competition with Nvidia.

Standard and Substandard are RELATIVE terms,I think in a area(hardware) where most compaies dont support Linux to any Extent Nvidias support is far from substandard, if you comparing Linux to Windows support I would agree. But then again apples and oranges.....

USR

[Anonymous Coward]

US Robotics 56k v.90 (flashable to v.92)
Works wonderful.

Re:USR

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, but what do you do to get linux to recognize it. I tried to get a modem to work with Red Hat 5.2, and it wouldn't recognize it. Do newer distros find external modems automatically?

Nvidia for how long?

[pajeromanco]

Considering the upcoming commercial alliance between Microsoft and NVidia, I wonder for how long they will be realeasing Linux drivers.

Nvidia rocks, ATI sucks... butdon't forget Matrox!

[EvilAlien]

License, schmicense. Who cares... Nvidia rocks, they release timely updates to the drivers, their cards take the performance and quality crown, and they seem to genuinely care about supporting Linux. I wish the same could be said for ATI, who may be cooperative with the community at times, but not consistently. I have nothing but bad things to say about ATI, and I'm embarassed to have ever purchased their products.

Another hardware vendor worthy of note is Matrox. They've done a good job in supporting Linux, and deserve recognition for that effort.

Wacom definately.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good tablets and are well supported.

Linux Media Labs

[Gernot]

Linux Media Labs actively supports the development of MJPEG video editing cards in Linux by providing cards, specs and development time, e.g. to the
MJPEG/Linux driver/application project

ICP Vortex

[sweepkick]

http://www.icp-vortex.com has decent linux support for their SCSI and Fibre-Channel RAID cards, including drivers and management utilities.

Nice cards too.

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.

Linksys...

[gillbates]

I have a few Linksys ethernet cards which came with Linux drivers - in binary form, though. I have started to see Linux mentioned on more and more hardware boxes, and this is a great improvement from printing out RedHat's hardware compatibility list and then going shopping. Plus, my mom can now by hardware that will work with our Linux systems, and I don't have worry so much about her buying junk that will only work with windows....

Re:Linksys...

[TeddyR]

The only problem I had with linksys cards was that they used the SAME model number [LNE100TX] for what is actually 4 different fards [http://www.linksys.com/download/driver.asp?dlid=2 ] that use several different driver versions.

I actually had a conversation (At Quakecon 2000 of all places) with someone at Linksys who finally admitted [off the record officially; but since they are no longer there... here goes] that they were aware of it, and that it was a marketing decision made high up at the time...

ROFLMAO at You All

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know why manufacturers don't build drivers or devices for linux? Simple economics... Linux does not pay.

Lets say I have a USB home scanner... I sell 200K of them. If only 1000 are going to be bought by Linux users, why bother even spending the R&D money for staff to research, build, test, and deliver drivers for this tiny percentage of users... it is not cost effective.

Further, the community gripes and bitches and screams boycott and holy hell at every device manufacturer because linux drivers are not available or not very good. This surely will drive the manufacturer to drop everything and make drivers just for the .5% of customers they have out of kindness... NOT. They HATE you, they hate your vile mouths, your screaming and bitching, your slanderous press acquisations, the whole tamale. They hate Linux as well because of how hard it is to make a good driver thanks to the lack of standards, support, and knowledge... and that my friends is all your fault.

Re:ROFLMAO at You All

[Anonymous Coward]

They hate Linux as well because of how hard it is to make a good driver thanks to the lack of standards, support, and knowledge...

Your troll fell apart here. You have obviously never written drivers for either Linux or Windows. Please try again.

Alcatel

[MarkoNo5]

Alcatel has drivers for their speedtouch ADSL modems.

http://www.speedtouchdsl.com/

There once was a great initiative started...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember, a few months ago, there was a non-profit initiative started called Spindletop. They had started a public database of 'Linux Friendly' manufacturers, Linux drivers and anything that had to do with Linux hardware. They also had a kick ass system called the Blackbird; a multiprocessing, ulstrasleek black cube with an LCD panel built in. Ahh, the good ol' days.

It would be great for something like that to take off...

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:The Role of Hardware Design

[Anonymous Coward]

on video cards, what do you think nvidia did with their detonator line of drivers, the same one works for a tnt as a geforce 4, kind of cool.

Re:Nvidia rocks, ATI sucks... butdon't forget Matr

[Afrosheen]

All I have to say is this:

Buy a radeon 8500 and try playing quake3 or anything else 3d in linux. Impossible.

Buy an Nvidia Geforce whatever or a lowly tnt. You'll be playing in 5 minutes or less.

Which one would you buy? It's obvious. Even though ATI provides a little community support, they don't personally work on the drivers and release them. Closed source, open source, the point is that ATI support SUCKS compared to Nvidia. All the DRI people say Radeon 8500 3d support sometime but it's taking a long, long time. I'll stick with Nvidia, a company I know and trust and can count on to supply me with high quality drivers.

Re:Wireless cards - Netgear

[rHOnDO]

I'm a Linux newbie and acknowledge I don't have a clue what the heck I'm doing, but ... when I configured my Micron laptop for dual boot (Windoze/RedHat), I thought I'd struggle getting the aftermarket Netgear MA401 wireless card to work. Guess I live right because I plugged it in, booted Linux and have had zero problems with it.

3Com

[King_TJ]

Yep - I agree too, except 3Com network cards aren't always all they're cracked up to be.

It's not so much a problem with driver support (or lack thereof), but they've produced millions of cards with flawed chipsets/hardware.

Ever use/see a 3C595 10/100 PCI card, for example? They've got issues. I've had a number of auto-sensing switches that wouldn't work with these cards unless you locked the cards at 10 mbit. first. Even on a cheap D-Link 8 port switch at home, I only get half-duplex operation whenever I plug in a 3C595.

There are acknowledgements that these cards were buggy, but you really have to dig around to find it stated on the manufacturer web site.

Then too, you have the extremely popular 3C905 (Etherlink XL) series adapters. Good cards, but 3Com made numerous revisions to them over the years - causing lots of confusion. Their latest Windows drivers simply probe the card and automatically deal with whichever variation it happens to be, hiding the problem from the end user -- but it's a hassle for others. (Look at www.rom-o-matic.net, where you can download Etherboot disks, and see how many 3C905 images they have posted up there!)

In my opinion, a revision that renders the previous driver completely unusable deserves giving the card a whole new model number.

Re:3Com

[Telastyn]

I've had problems with 3com905(b and c) with certain switches. The cards would eventually cease auto-negotiating with certain types of switches. Probably something on the card died due to heat/use. Granted it's only been 3-4 cards in maybe 200 i've seen, but still; something to note.

Re:3Com

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd tons of problems with 905b/c cards and auto-negotiation over the years, even in NT, so it's not just you.

LSI Logic

[Anonymous Coward]

LSI Logic has included drivers for their Symbios SCSI and fibre-channel cards for years. I'm currently running 4 Seagate Cheetah drives on a Symbios LDV card...they scream!

MultiTech

[Anonymous Coward]

MultiTech provides excellent support for the *nix community. I have used their support and/or code to bail me out of jams on several occasions.

Epson - 1240/1250/1650 Photo

[timothy]

You wrote: "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!"

Hear, hear! I wasted half a day because I picked up a 1250, figuring that it had just been accidentally left off the list of acceptable Epson printers (acceptable as listed on the Mandrake list of compatible hardware that is). After all, if all these other models work, and have similar model names, shouldn't this? Bad, bad, bad reasoning. Eh, I knew it was a slight gamble, but was unhappy to find out I'd lost.

Eventually, I went back and paid quite a bit more but ended up with an Epson Perfection 1650 Photo, and I'm happy with the tradeup. Works great with XSane (though for some reason it's recognized as a "GT8200" rather than a 1650 Photo -- eh, whatever), has been gobbling up my photographs and other documents for a couple of weeks now. I have no current need for the transparency adapter (already have a slide scanner thingie for my Nikon), but I suppose it's nice to have.

I am impressed with XSane -- Olivier Rauch, thank you!

timothy

IDE hardware RAID

[unger]

3ware.com

new opensource project?

[THEbwana]

Heres an idea...why not create a site that rates compatibility (say on a 5 level scale with 5 meaning "they provide the source freely" to 1 meaning "binary driver only usable on kernel 1.1.13")
rating could be done through users voting (?) and the end result would be a product with a rating made by the community.
- The manufacturers who make it onto the list gets one of those icons "compatible with linux" (with level rating and a link to a page that would explain the meaning of the rating) use when advertising.
- This would enable the companies supporting linux to market this in a more efficient way, thereby increasing the pressure on the companies that dont support Linux yet.
... just my 2 c..
/m

Axis Communication

[KjetilK]

High on my list is Axis Communication. They have a nice chip with lots of neat stuff that runs Linux, and they also got this chip in printservers, bluetooth access points, etc. I think those are they guys who wrote most of the Bluetooth code in Linux.

I really want a BT access point, I was just hoping the prize would come down a bit to make it viable for home use. I really don't need the range either.

Re:Axis Communication

[bluetoad]

Their cameras are so cool. They run Linux on board and just plug into your hub.b They use sensible TCP/IP protocols

and from

http://www.axis.com/products/camera_servers/qa.h tm

Q: Why is it running Linux, and how can I see it?
A: The fact that the unit is running Linux is something that is not visible from outside. But some of the benefits of running Linux include:

* Well-known and well-documented and reliable OS, easy to employ new developers and they will get up to speed very quickly.
* Small footprint system, it does not take a lot of flash or ram memory.
* Longer term decentralized development which we as a multinational company will benefit from.
* Much functionality available for "free".
* The source code for Linux is freely available to everyone. Axis posts source at developer.axis.com
* Developed under the GNU General Public License.
* Our future OEMs will have faster and easier development. Instead of Axis doing all the work we will be able to focus on assisting them during their development.

Re:I'm only interested

[penguin_punk]

A/S/L?

A pic would be nice as well..

harware

[BadTuna]

It might help Linux in the OS world if it were able to use a winmodem. I'm sure many people do not have the money to replace their modems.

Re:harware

[moncyb]

Linux does have support for some winmodems. Check out linmodems.org. However, I don't think winmodems are a good thing for internet access/gaming. They are just cheap soundcards that have a telephone jack as a connector--real modems use a chip to process the signals. Having your CPU do the signal processing slows down your computer. It's better to buy a real modem and save money on a slower processor--or have a fast processor that isn't bogged down with unneeded crap...

However the winmodems may be useful with some of the alternative suggestions on the linmodem page. A voice mail server could be quite nice...

Linux WLAN

[Fembot]

The drivers for Prism/Prism2 chip based 802.11b cards was actualy better than the windows drivers from what I found.

GNU Business Network (GBN)

[DelphiGeek]

This type of question is the type of thing the GNU Business Network hopes to help spolight more. You can a rough proposal of the GBN here. (i.e. Not what companies use Free Software, but what companies support Free Software.

Re:I'm only interested

[Anonymous Coward]

> companies are run by white males who offer little opportunity for minority females to work for them,
> let alone get ahead.

Did you ever consider that getting a job could be UNRELATED to your skin color/genitals?

There are TONS of qualified white males who get turned down for the same jobs. In fact, you can bet for every job you didn't get, 99 white males didn't get it, either! (Numbers like this just based on standard IT boy-girl ratios!)

There could be a variety of reasons. One common one I've found is that management at ANY company is prone to mistakes that lead to hiring freezes. They SAY they have opportunities open but that's just a cover so they don't have to say "No money for expansion this quarter." Or they hire the wrong people. Sometimes you're too young. Or too old. Or TOO qualified (which makes your prospective boss feel intimidated). Not to point fingers at you, but you *might* have a chip on your shoulder about the whole gender/ethnicity thing that just turns people off. Or maybe you are just encountering more than the usual number of racists in the field.

I've rarely known racist computer geeks -- people who read sci-fi which includes talking dolphins with full person status rarely have trouble accepting other HUMANS on an equal level -- but hiring managers tend to be people without technical skills and often with deficient people skills in general.

I've never yet had a good manager, and bad managers do seem to be the norm at IT companies (just see all those slashdot stories about THAT subject!).

If you're really motivated, and are determined not to let other people dictate your level of advancement, start your own company.

What better way to show up everyone who tried to keep you down than taking their customers away?

3ware Escalade IDE RAID card

[edgarde]

My 6410 RAID card autodetected nicely when I installed RedHat 7.2. With driver & firmware upgrades available on their website, supports a 160GB IDE HD. Yay.

3ware have been really nice about releasing Red Hat & SuSE Linux drivers (with source I think -- there's a src/ directory with a .tgz I haven't looked at) side by side Windows drivers. (Oddly, they don't bother with Mac drivers.)

Re:3ware Escalade IDE RAID card

[mwillis]

I believe they do have a binary though; the 3dmd thing that rebuilds arrays etc. I bought a 6400 (cheap) last year and it works great. However, at one point last autumn, they (3ware) said they were going to stop making escalades altogether. A few weeks later they recanted. But one gets the idea that if they de-support the escalade, then it's the scenario the nvidia alarmists point to.

HomePNA 2.0

[dissonant7]

Here's a story for you...

I have a LinkSys USB Phoneline 10mbs (HomePNA 2.0) network adapter. When I discovered there were no linux drivers for it (first on their website, then through emailing them), I decided to find out what the chipset was. The chipset is a Broadcom 4400. There are linux drivers for the 4400, but they are proprietary (Broadcom developed and owns them) and when I asked Broadcom for a copy, I was told they are only given to OEMs, and then only on request. Linksys hasn't bothered to request them, and neither has any other OEM that uses the 4400.

sigh

Re:HomePNA 2.0

[TeddyR]

It could be that "only on request"; but they may charge the OEM a "License Fee" for the rights to distribute the driver making it so that they have to inrease the price of the product, which may make it uncompetitivly priced when compared to the OEMS that went windows-only.... [consumers and OEMs are fickle... How else can you explain winmodems?]

Don't Buy Dell, especially the laptops

[hansreiser]

They have service technicians who are eager to tell you that their management has told them not to support any operating system other than the one that was sold with the laptop. Of course, their laptops cannot be bought with Linux, and getting linux to work on them is a nightmare. The cost of your time and your sysadmin's time to make everything just work might equal the cost of the laptop.

One of the technicians actually told me to reinstall windows as it was, and then call him back.

Re:Don't Buy Dell, especially the laptops

[SnapperHead]

Well, I own 3 Dell laptops. Never had a problem getting anything to work on them. These laptops are over 1 year old. The sound drivers tend to be a problem getting initially working.

I haven't ordered a pre-installed version of Linux from them, so I dont know what the deal is with that.

I had 1 desktop that gave me problems. It was bought in November, I deleted the XP install 10 mins after getting it and installed RH. There was something wrong with there hardware. So, tring to get them to fix it was a nightmare. They said that since XP wasn't on it anymore, they couldn't help me. Needless to say, after hours on the phone aruging with there techs explaing what the problem was, I got a full refund and returned the machine. Sure, this was a 1 in a million chance, but it upset me enough not to buy desktops from them. I just didn't have the time to build my own system, which I ended up doing anyway. I will still keep buying laptops from them however.

Re:Don't Buy Dell, especially the laptops

[THEbwana]

..Also had hardware problems...after removing the harddrive and doing a low level format I noticed that it had a *lot* of errors rendering around 4 Gb useless. They replaced the drive (onsite!) and gave me a drive twice as big with no extra cost. That was the wonderful part.
- The bad part was that a lot of the hardware was incompatible with Linux (due to the fact that it wasn't me choosing the machine there was a lot of win-only hardware; soundcard, modem etc.). I have since come to terms with the fact that Dell simply aren't selling products that I want - I now buy IBM or Apple.
If they want me or people like me as a customer - they'll have to change.
/m

Re:Don't Buy Dell, especially the laptops

[SnapperHead]

I belive IBM would be a better choice since they are seriously supporting Linux these days. Dell does use a lot of software based hardware. Thats why I requested no modem or network card. Didn't need the modem, but the network card they provided was unknown. They didn't know the chipset and I didn't want to take a risk/

More ammo for the NVIDIA/ATI Lunix debate

[TheLastUser]

I think we all wish NVIDIA would open source their drivers. Not because of a desire for all software to be free, but because it could then be included with pre-compiled kernels.

Every time I update my kernel I have to do the extra step of messing about with the NVIDIA driver. If it was open, then RedHat would put it in the kernel and life would be that much easier.

I can understand why they might want to keep the driver closed, but I think next time I buy a card, I might opt for an ATI since it will remove the added step.

Either way, thanks to NVIDIA for making a Linux driver that works well and comes with a well documented installation procedure. I can't ask any more than that from a hardware supplier.

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.

Sometimes binary drivers are a company's only opt.

[Maller]

I was hired to develop linux drivers for my company's cards (multichannel MPEG2/4 playback). I was hoping to open source my work. It seems that a few years before we had released the source to a partner company who, approximately one year later, were building almost identical cards released with our driver. It seems that in our market the abilities we have put into the driver is what differentiates us from our competition. Sure if we hadn't been such a small company at the time we could have hired lawyers to draw up viable NDAs but at the time we didn't have lots of extra money to spend on frivilous things like lawyers.

NVIDIA

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Acer, SiS and VIA

[The Caja Kid]

Acer, SiS and VIA have been supportive with both hardware and software for the LinuxBIOS project. From what I remember reading on the mailing list a while back, the engineers were quite helpful.

Linksys

[SnapperHead]

I have been using Linksys network cards and misc network stuff for close to 3 years now. I won't use anything else. Why ? Becuase, I have never had a problem with Linksys running on Linux. In fact, I just ordered another Access Point and 5 PCMCIA cards yesterday.

NVIDIA is another story. I have a GeForce 3, which I bought about 2 months ago. I *STILL* have problems getting it to work. I have spent countless hours making it work. So, I went back to using my old Voodoo 3 for my Linux workstation. I am using the GeForce 3 for Everquest.

I am happy that NVIDIA is at least supporting Linux, but it will take them some time to perfect it. I will give them some slack with it becuase I remeber the old Voodoo 3 drivers when they first came out.

Keyspan usb/serial adapters

[beefubermensch]

Keyspan supports Linux. We're about to release a new version of the driver, which we've modified in-house to fix many bugs. I wouldn't say we excel at Linux, but we're interested in it, and as far as I know our policy is to devote as much time as we can based on estimated sales into the Linux market. Anybody out there trying to run a headless server on a machine without native DB-9 ports?

NetGear

[Anonymous Coward]

The company I worked for wanted to store a case or so of backup NIC's for the NOC. We were moving to a predominant "Linux" environment. During the move, we'd had a couple NIC's go out, using the replacements, it was time to stockpile a case or so. I did some research and found that NetGears website showed this particular 100bt card supporting linux, drivers included and information found on the website. After purchasing the NIC's (an entire case of 100bt cards), an older NIC went out in one of the production servers. I swapped the NIC's out with one of the new NetGears. After fighting it, reading online DOC's and extensively researching NetGears site, the NIC was found not to work on Linux. Soon, all documentation on their site pertaining to that particular NIC model and support of Linux disappeared.

And that as they say, was that.

Iomega

[CuriousGeorge113]

I actually went through the tech support training at Iomega (I had to quit thereafter due to a scheduleing confilct).

Anyway, we were given a somwwhat extensive training on how to support Iomegas devices with Linux environments, including where to get drivers, ect.

Now, I've never had try and use these drivers, so I don't know much about them. However, I do know that if you call Iomega for help installing their devices on your Linux PC, their tech reps are trained to help you.

~~Dan

Dunno if it's "active" support, but...

[seebs]

When I wanted to get drivers written for a Linksys USB->802.11b adapter, they didn't *donate* drivers, but they offered to sell me a couple of units at their "employee discount" rate for development and testing. I'd call that fairly supportive.

Linux support is only half the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Vendor drivers are great -- but they are only half the solution. If you want to adapt the driver to another OS, or re-write part of it, can you get the necessary documentation? Just because a driver is open-source doesn't mean that you can fix a bug or add a feature -- you need the programming manual to do that.

VA?

[Mignon]

Ok, well I guess VA doesn't make hardware anymore, but I recall they were active in writing RAID code for the hardware they shipped. Of course they also have (or had, I don't keep up with this) quite a few heavy-hitter kernel developers on their payroll.

This reveals a major misunderstanding

[njdj]

Let them support the hardware first. Sometimes there are things you may not understand that keeps them from just saying:
"HERE IS HOW THE DEVICE WORKS! - COMPETITORS PLEASE COPY IT"

There is a world of difference between interface specs, and telling "how the device works".
Reminds me of the story about the kid whose father told him that if he didn't go to school, he'd never understand how common, everyday things like electric light, worked.

The kid looked at his father pityingly and said: "I already know how electric lights work. You flip the switch, and the light comes on".

Keep this in mind when you read a comment like the one I'm replying to. We're not asking for the equivalent of how to make resistive filaments that withstand temperatures of 3000 degrees C for thousands of hours. We're asking the equivalent of, which switches do I hit to make the light come on.

What About An Itanium???

[Anonymous Coward]

I just think that nvidia isn't gonna support its older hardware on 64bit proccessors, so next year, when I get a 64 bit processor, I have to throw out all my old nvidia hardware and get a new card...

- AC

My answers.

[/dev/trash]

My nvidia TNT 2 Ultra - Perfect.
Aureal Vortex 2 - perfect
USR Modem - perfect
Netgear NIC - perfect
Epson C60 printer USB and LPT - Perfect in LPT, only prints .ps files in USB mode. no jpg, etc.
Mustek LPT port scanner - perfect
Zip Drive LPT port, daisy chained from scanner - perfect
Hauppage Video Capture card - perfect
Belkin 4 port USB hub - perfect

Re:I second this... - Well, I don't

[Nurf]

Which is akin, in some cases, to saying "come on in and take the kitchen sink while you're at it" for hardware manufacturers.

As a hardware designer I can say this is almost never the case. If you're any good, you know exactly how something was done. This doesn't mean that you can program the hardware though, because there are still too many ways they could lay out the interfaces.

I'll say it again: It is extremely rare that you are giving anything "secret" away by telling somehow to interface to your device. I'm sure lawyers like forcing their engineers to keep quiet, just in case, but there is no real technical reason to do this. It's akin to designing a car and using your own controls, then not telling drivers which pedals do what.

I see fear here, not reason.

I'm Too Slow

[Matthew Weigel]

Wait, I'm an idiot. They is grammatically a plural but semantically a neuter singular!

Nuts, you beat me to it. I was reading responses to see if anyone else got it... and I guess you did :-)

NOT Sony laptops

[OsamaBinLogin]

I got a z505r laptop 2 years ago. All the LinuxLaptop sites had lots of trip reports about how this linux and that linux work ok, yada yada.

It was a nightmare. The basics worked except you couldn't turn off the tapping on the touchpad, so typing anything longer than one line was frustrating as hell. The cursor would jump to a different place, right in the middle of a word, and your fingers wouldn't stop till a few words later. So you spend 15 seconds cutting and pasting to fix it. Every two minutes.

Finally a hack was found that fixed it (thanks bruce kall) (see tactileint.com/linux/vaiolinux.html if you care). But it's not ideal. EG it reverts to tapping after most sleep modes. FreeBSD isn't fixed, nor the 2.4 kernel. Kindof stuck.

Their tech support website scans for "linux" - any question that includes it, gets a form letter reply, "we don't support".

I wish THIS thread, or a Summary, was available somewhere, to basically tell people who are shopping for laptops for linux, "get IBM and DELL, not SONY, yada yada". Instead of just pretending that they all work OK because somebody got something to work somewhere once.

Re:NOT Sony laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, with a little work, the Vaio GR390 works quite well. It does work, mostly, with stock redhat 7.2, but sound is an issue requiring ALSA drivers, a little mungery, and the latest ACPI patch.

Most of the problem is that ACPI is not mature in linux.

Canon

[dosun88888]

They are terrible about providing linux drivers. I have one of those n1220u scanners (the thin grey ones) and it only works on windows, or old school macs.

I will never buy anything from canon, as they not only refuse to support linux, but they act like they're doing you a favor to tell you that you should buy windows.

~D

Nvidia's good work

[morbid]

You should also mention that NVidia have done what the Linux kernel developers should have, and written their own interface between the kernel and their binary-only drivers. My experience with a TNT2 Ultra, once they didi get their drivers out, has been superb. If the kernel people would provide a standard (fixed for at least a x.*.x kernel series) interface for device drivers, we might find that a lot of companies that are scared of open-source suddenly start to make Linux drivers available.

Xerox (NOT)

[fordboy0]

Let's all not forget about those wonderful Docuprint P8's that so many of us own. What a great printer for a reasonable price... Until you try to use it under Linux of course ;)
I had to set it up on Winblows XPerience with Redmon and Ghostscript as an SMB share just to print to the damn thing.
Quote from LinuxPrinting.org "Paperweight".
Xerox has been contacted many times about this deficiency and they have no interest.

Not a card for everyone but...

[Barondude]

Sangoma makes WAN cards that run under Linux. They work great under every Linux distro/kernel I have tried. Additionally, Sangoma provides quaility tech support. You can even talk to the man who worte the Linux drivers.

Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than increasing their support, vendors are now cutting back or going out of business now that the *linux hype is fading. Solid business and groud swell support is swinging towards the technically superior FreeBSD operating system. We should take note and start pushing for FreeBSD support in order to truly advance the state of the art of computing, rather than copying and redoing it like *linux has been doing for the past 10 years.

Re:Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Device base of Linux is severeal times bigger that BSD has. What's a stupid idea to port all of those drivers back to BSD if it already perfectly works on Linux?

And Linux is not dying - BSD is. Linux is working on mainframes and clusters, x86 and Mac, Power4 and Sparc and many others. It runs application and database servers, corporate firewalls and workgroup servers. Now it goes to destops of non-M$-friendly goverments.

And once the financial piramid buble of M$ will blow up - Linux will be virtually everywhere. Where will be BSD? Only on old dying firewals installed more than 5 years ago, stupidly protecting port#80-hole without noticing that nowadays all "interesting" traffic is going in both directions naimly through #80 wrapped in SOAP or REST :)

Honestly, I've tried FreeBSD at my home - half of modern hardware was not even recognized without any traces for drivers or any development of those drivers. I killed BSD. RedHat recognized almost everything at installation time. The rest - with new kernel. Who is dying?

I like an idea of packages in FreeBSD - it is designed and implemented much better than RPM of RedHat. Actually, I liked it. Until I tried anything Java related - it did not work and was not able to hack. OS without Java? Are you kidding?

Specifically about FreeBSD packages - most of them came as a standard .tgz plus additional set of patches for FreeBSD. That means that most of TGZ vendors doesn't know about FreeBSD or ignore it. Again, who is dying?

Sony PS2!

[Anonymous Coward]

woohoo!

Re:Sometimes binary drivers are a company's only o

[Anonymous Coward]

Well how can you easily pester the company that misused you source? Give your source to everybody so they don't have an advantage :o)

ESS

[Anonymous Coward]

ESS also does linux support well for modems and the widely used ESS sound chips.

this hardware works with Linux out of the box!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some assembly required

The ting that is stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that is stupid is,the companies who make the hardware are hurting themselves over the drivers....how many linux users are there? like over 10 million if not double that.(BIG MARKET)

They would double their sales if they could start making drivers for linux and its not like its brain surgery or anything. Just about any good linux programmer can whip up a stable driver easily,ecspecially since they have the full specs to the hardware itself.

Re:ATI and shareholders and minorities.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Why are all you mean people oppressing the corporate masses? It's not like they have enough to wory about, with hire-and-fire schemes, FUD, and underhanded litigiousness... Now you people want the corporate climate to earn your money by providing you with something you -desire-?!?!? You inconsiderate bastards! Why don't you just blend in with the masses? If the blacks, italians, jews and amerindians in the USA had listened to this conformist wisdom, we wouldn't be in the predicament we are today.

Sorry, I can't agree

[HiThere]

If you get a binary dirver, you're getting something that will work until the next time you upgrade your system. If you get the source, then you're getting something that will work until you change your hardware.

I upgrade my OS frequently (perhaps excessively). So binary drivers aren't worth that much to me. And this is *WITHIN* the x86 hardware line. Now if I wanted to try a different cpu ... well, I might need to edit the source. But just forget porting the binary!

Binary is a nice accompaniment to the source, but it's not a replacement. And I'm not even a driver developer. I depend on other people to have put together the drivers that I use. But I still need to be able to adapt for when, say, I change libraries.

N.B.: This is also true for programs of other sorts. The only binary file's I'll buy these days are games. And that's because it doesn't hurt me if they stop working. Which they do.

Software people have much better reasons to be upset about this than hardware people do. If you're selling me a dololly that plings the inghams, why should you care which version of the OS I use? Your aren't giving away any great secrets by telling me which pins to signal when I want to activate it. The software people generally either need to provide their entire source code, or statically link the entire OS. They have reasons to be upset by this. But they don't have the right to take my money for something that stops working immediately. If I have the source, I can probably recompile it, and I might be able to fix it (if not, someone else can). So it's worth my while. If I don't, I've thrown my money down the drain. And if that's what they're asking me to do, we've got a problem:
They don't have a customer, and I don't have a vendor.
But better that than that I've wasted my money on something worthless.

I'm sure that there are other answers. It seems to me that they should be able to build "compatibility libraries" that can both be compiled on whatever the current system is and can be called by their program to do it's work. But so far nobody seems to do that (except some of the open source projects). Now I will grant you that this probably wouldn't suffice to overcome major version upgrades. The kind of which they say "This will break binary compatibility". At least not usually. But that they could generally overcome by just recompiling the internal code (which I will grant they have a reason to keep secret, if they grant that I have a reason to insist on it working through upgrades).

Just which drivers do you _have_ to compile in,

[BattyMan]

anyway?

That's a fundamental problem with monolithic kernels. Linux will continue to be rejected by the unwashed masses when adding new hardware means compiling a new kernel.

I have tons of drivers, configured as installable modules. These all seem to work well enough, and are loadable/unloadable on the fly (try _that_ with a M$ driver or TSR!). I've never had to recompile a Kernel. Sure it's fun and all, but you don't need to recompile your Kernel everything you change some piece of hardware if you leave the driver module _outside_ the Kernel and install it at bootup time. I set up the drivers I want (with modconf) & let it rip. If I were a hardware mfgr wanting to support Linux I would definately build installable Kernel modules to distribute. Source code for these is a different question. I fail to understand the hardware manufacturer's objections to the release of hardware interface specifications. There's a major difference between describing how a piece of machinery _acts_ and revealing the gritty details of what's going on inside of it, and the more complex the machine is the wider this gap becomes. It takes six to eighteen months to reverse engineer or clone a chip, and by then the manufacturer of the original has had plenty of time to release his next version, making both his old version and your clone worthless.

Re:Just which drivers do you _have_ to compile in,

[Wavicle]

I'm not talking from a completely baseless pedestal here. I've written a Linux device driver, and am well aware of how loadable modules work. I am also well aware that everybody who tries or has tried distributing a binary module has had trouble. In fact to the best of my knowledge, nobody has built my driver from source (separately from the kernel source) as a module that could be loaded into the mdksecure kernel - so no binary would work for that anyway (and if you're using mandrake, there is a high probability you'll end up using that kernel).

How many binary module configurations would I have to make available to catch a reasonable swath of Linux users? How much would it cost me in support everytime someone says "Hey, when I add your module it says I might taint the kernel"?

What reasons do they have for not releasing specs? Well, in the case of my driver, the manufacturer (a fairly small player in the imaging industry) had come up with a clever way of doing color images at 8 bits per pixel with more color information than any other 8 bit per pixel color scheme. This means their camera can send either more fps than a similar quality camera, or more quality than another 8 bpp camera.

There are a lot of small players who have come up with something clever and would rather keep it as intellectual property than patent it for the world to see. The majority of users don't care if its open source or proprietary, they just want it to work.

Re:Just which drivers do you _have_ to compile in,

[BattyMan]

oOps - forgot about the boycott.
I'll answer you next week.

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.

Canon Usb Scanner Support - Information and links

[bosse]

I've had the same experience with canon.. I have sent them an email and got a polite reply that they would send my comments to the appropriate person. After that i didn't hear a word from them..

Well we are not doomed afterall.. There is still work in progress going on and I actually got my scanner (canoscan 656u) to work (not with the nice sane interface), so I could use it under linux.

Here are a few links regarding canon usb scanners that might prove useful:

Canon N650U Linux Driver Development

SANE backend / Tools for Canon USB Scanners

It might pay off if some more people wrote to canon about the need for linux-drivers:

Canon eCare <CareCenter@cits.canon.com>

USB Scanner

[Anonymous Coward]

Negatory on Microtek too. I can't use my USB scanner. :(

(btw, I'm not an anonymous coward, but when I click on the Create an Account link it just goes to another Login page, and I'm not willing to dig around for the real acct-creation page)

MODERATORS ON CRACK!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:NVIDIA Detonator 4 Linux

[BigFootApe]

Hmm...
I haven't used any FireGL cards in XFree86, but ATI provides drivers for it. I understand drivers for the FireGL line are another team's responsibility, and they're certainly not mentioned in the FAQ, but it still counts.

I don't know about quality, but it's probably pretty good.

You fucking moron

[Anonymous Coward]

"Closed source drivers are 100% illogical and unacceptable under any circumstance. That's all there is to it."

What about drivers for Windows? I have seen very few drivers for Windows that WEREN'T closed-source...

Just like the ENTIRE Windows OS.

NVidia's drivers work fine for me, and if you have a problem with that, then go and hack ATI's drivers to make them actually work.

Re:You fucking moron

[Ogerman]

What about drivers for Windows? I have seen very few drivers for Windows that WEREN'T closed-source...

What does this have to do with Windows? I don't use Windows. NVidia's binary drivers are a pain because they have to try to keep up with every change made to X and the linux kernel. Frankly, I don't know why they'd want to do it themselves and not just give out the docs so the community can develop them.

Oh, and by the way, the open drivers for ATI cards work beautifully. Dunno about Windows, but who cares. Windows sucks anyhow.

DISC Inc.

[Eric Green]

DISC Storage.

Not only do they have all the SCSI specs for their jukeboxes and optical drives online so driver writers can easily access them, but they pay my salary too :-). Right now all DISC/NSM hardware is supported by the 'mtx' media changer program for Linux (which I maintain, which is distributed with Debian, RedHat, SuSE, and probably other Linux distributions). The only thing that does not currently work is importing media via the import/export slot on the NSM DVD-RAM libraries, which because of the hardware involved needs extra support (the standard way of handling import/export -- send a MOVE_MEDIUM command with a source and destination address of the mail slot to tell the jukebox to stick out its tongue -- doesn't work because the hardware must know which slot you're going to import the disk into before it sticks out its tongue, because it must move that caddy to the mail slot -- the caddies stay inside the box, you get the bare disks spit out at you or you insert bare disks rather than have to mess with caddies yourself). I'm currently working on adding support for those special features (and features such as the disk pack mechanism) to the 'mtx' suite.

-E

Crucial.com and Micron

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait a minute, they don't require drivers. ;)

Thank you!

[swagr]

I will definately bookmark that for future reference.

Re:3ware, Directly in the kernel

[darkfox]

When we installed our server almost 2 years ago, we were REALLY pleased to found out that our brand new 3ware Escalade 6800 was detected automatically at the first boot of the Debian installation;)

The 3Ware Escalade is indeed supported directly in the kernel since 2.2.15!

--
"I am feeling weird today, are you?" -The Great Mushkins

Re:Linksys (except rev. 2)

[Anonymous Coward]

Lotsa problems with the lne100tx rev.2 card. You have to download the driver for it from scyld.com and compile it by hand for it to work, unless you're on the old 2.2 kernel.

my list

[dherron]

from my own experience
good:
linksys
ati
hp
creative
cant say what sucks because i havent bought anything i wasnt 100% sure about.
always check the linux hardware database before buying

Not just 3ware's RAID, but Promise ATA RAID too

[gatesh8r]

I've set up ATA/100 RAID controllers with the drivers available on Promise's site and lately in the kernel config I've see the Promise set of drivers available, so maybe they gave the source back to the community.

M-Audio / Midiman

[fishbowl]

I had quite a shock when I bought a M-Audio Delta
card. The reason I bought this card was that it is the only product in a certain narrow range of
specifications that has Linux support. There is even a penguin sticker on the box.

What they mean by "Linux support" is that there is
an ALSA driver for the ICE-1712 chipset. Now, I'm not totally upset about this -- it *does* work. But it was quite a reach for the company to go as far as to specify Linux support on the box and in all the advertising, but not even include the ALSA software on the CD in the box!

Why binary only is bad

[jmorris42]

If you need to update your kernel to get the latest shiny top working and your binary only vendor has not got around to releasing a new version for that kernel... you are screwed.

When said vendor decides your product is 'end of life' and you want to apply a new kernel to close a security hole, you are screwed.

I could fill pages with variations on the theme but anyone who hasn't got the point yet won't.

Sangoma

[GigsVT]

Sangoma has full Linux support on all their WanRouter series of PCI based CSU/DSU cards. It's nice to eliminate the unnecessary hardware and be able to run a firewall directly on your Linux CSU/DSU. The drivers never crash in my experience, it's fully as stable as a "real" CSU/DSU.

If you have a fractional or full T1, be sure to check out Sangoma before you shell out lots of money for Cisco stuff.

Sangoma!

[broody]

The vendor whose Linux support that simply blew me away was Sangoma! They wrote a quad port PPP over HDLC Linux driver for the S5142 WANPipe card to solve my company's problem. We needed a router to handle 8 PPP ports for an old leased line and thanks to Sangoma we had a cheap and robust Linux solution.

That was back on 2.2.16. I remember some changes in the PPP kernel code caused problems on releases above that but I am sure it's ancient history now.

I cannot recommend Sangoma highly enough. Great product, service, and people.

SiS and Acer Labs (ALi) love Linux!

[DeathPenguin]

They're even involved in the LinuxBIOS ( http://www.linuxbios.org ) project. SiS has solid Linux drivers available right off their page, many of which seem to have been written by Ollie Lho.

nVidia deserves honorable mention as well, as they have the best Linux drivers for video devices. They may not be open source, they perform as well as their Windows counterparts, include support for features like their Windows counterparts, and are just overall solid drivers.

Creative and Nvidia

[markdev]

I had a very nice time getting my SBLive and Nvidia GeForce to work under linux. And thanks to those two Loki, I can play Unreal Tournament at my LAN parties.

Closed specs

[jmorris42]

No, actually I come from the old school where all hardware came with programmer's information. It was just an accepted and expected part of buying hardware. Then the 'end users' came along and companies stopped providing it in the manual to save space but would provide it if you asked. Somewhere along the line they decided that information was now a vital trade secret.

Bull. If your hardware is so lame that letting anyone see how it works would destroy it's value it probably didn't have much to start with. I know hardware reviews would be a lot more informative if real information was still available.

Since NVIDIA is the popular whipping boy today, lets use them as an example. Assume that the popular belief is true and that much of the value of their hardware is in their drivers. Open sourcing them would give away valuable secrets so they might not want to do it. Fine. Details on the interface between the software and the hardware still should not be harmful to their secrets. If their drivers really represent most of their value it might be a long time before the XFree nv driver equaled theirs, but that would be ok by me. I actually use the closed driver with an old TNT2, but I'd feel a lot better about buying a current card if I knew the investment was safe.

A cheap way for HW vendors to support Linux...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Here's how hardware developers (and not just ATI) can get solid Linux support on the cheap:

If:

You haven't done a Linux driver yet.

You have done a good Windows driver.

You OWN the source code for your Windows driver.

The source code doesn't leak a deep dark trade secret (if it does - PATENT it and then it won't).

Then release:

The Windows driver source under an Open Source license, along with...

documentation of the device. (That's typically schematics, chip specs, and maybe some internal docs and/or memos from the development team.)

You already have it. Vet it for any deep secrets and licencing problems with your partners, but otherwise don't bother to clean it up. Just dump it on us.

I'm sure that if your device is AT ALL interesting somebody in the Linux community will be GLAD to port your driver - and any future upgrades.

Compaq

[Anonymous Coward]

After you read the compaq page, make sure you print it and wipe your ass with it. Compaq hardware (and software too) sucks major ass.

Re:False statements - Punish them! (Trademark..!)

[Anonymous Coward]

If they tout being "Linux supported" and not being that. Make it known on mailing lists etc.. And help GPL jihad :), because otherwise they will just use linux to get advantages and not giving back!!
I se very little difference between breaking the GPL and abusing the Linux trademark!

Re:For USB scanners: Epson Employee.

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad you like them. Have you tried the C60's? They work too.

Re:Epson printers-nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes we are. Shame some of the hardware (internally) isn't always what I would like it to be. But hey a happy customer is a repeat customer.

Mac is very native for linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Macintosh platform, especially G3/G4, is very friendly for Linux. What I cannot say about the comapny called Apple. When Apple people hear Linux - their reaction is alike they just recently poisoned.

However, that's the marketing face of that company. Apparently, some good people work inside Apple, desinging an creating computer systems very compatible to Linux. Of course, with the major work done by Linux/PPC development team. I am not sure about their political details but I love the result.

In last 3 years an average amount of problems I has been having with x86 and Redhat comparing to Mac and LinuxPPC (later YDL, also RH-based) are virtually the same. What I cannot say about Sun's Sparc or IBM's PPC.

Cost of changes

[Dwonis]

Yep. It basically comes down to the cost of getting the changes YOU need in the drivers. With open-source drivers and a good set of specifications, if your drivers are missing some functionality or you need a really annoying bug fixed, you can:

• Pay a programmer to fix the problem. Assuming that programmer makes $60/hour, and the changes will take 30 hours, the cost to you is approximately $1800.
• Fix the problem yourself, if you are able. Only costs your time.
• Ask someone else to fix the problem with your help. For example, making a polite request on the mailing list for someone to help you. Many open-source developers will help you with the problem, especially if you buy/lend them the card you're using, which would cost no more than $400 (and that's an expensive card).
• Wait until someone else encounters the same problem and gets it fixed using the methods above. This is a risky option, since it may never happen, but it still does happen quite often for widespread bugs.

If nVidia doesn't think it's worth it to fix the problem, you can:

• Nag nVidia, talk to a salesman, try hard to find the right person to call, call that person, find out that you have to pay a large sum of money to licence nVidia's source code (which you may not have -- most people stop at this point, if not sooner), then use the methods above to solve the problem, then figure out how to get nVidia to roll the changes back into their version. You can estimate the cost of that.

So, given nVidia's model and the open-source model, which would you take?

Software commoditizing

[Dwonis]

I mentioned it in another thread, but I'll write it again:

Software -- especially operating systems -- is becoming a commodity. Companies that maintain "90% of users only want..." or "Best viewed with..." policies will not survive.

NetGear PCMCIA 411 card

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to get the LinkSys PCMCIA card working and called their support and they claim to not support Linux at all. Even on the box it isn't supported.
I returned it and got a NetGear 411 PCMCIA and it had Linux drivers on the CD and I called support just for fun (it worked right away, no drivers needed, MDK 8.2 on a older laptop) and acted like I had a problem and they put a linux guru on the line.
NetGear is cool when it comes to Linux!
These companies should learn, it's not that hard to be supportive of Linux, just open up a bit and communicate with the developers, you don't need to spend all that much on resources.

Atmel == bad, D-link == ok, linksys == bad

[pewloo]

I've had my d-link dwl-120 which uses the atmel at76c503a chipset. Not only are there no linux drivers(the project on sourceforge is just for uploading the firmware) but atmel refuses to release the specs. Buyers beware. The same applies the linksys WUSB11 (not version 1.5) D-link, on the other hand, has been very helpful, and the tech support actually humoured me. However no refund was possible. Linksys, gave me the "linux isnt supported, blah blah" speech. In summary, linksys and atmel are evil, and d-link is ok.

quite a few IMHO

[BOFH_org]

HP (the HPOJ driver for officejets)
http://hpoj.sourceforge.net
Silicon Graphics Inc.
http://oss.sgi.com
NVidia
http://www.nvidia.com
Adaptec
http://www.adaptec.com
LsiLogic
http://www.lsilogic.com
IBM
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux
and I'm sure there are much more to come.
have a nice day
BOFH_org

Re: evo n600c

[szo]

Didn't you have problems with the fan? We also tried to run linux on this laptop and the cpu fan stopped and we could get it run. Of course the laptop overheated, so we had to go back to win :(
Any ideas?

thx

Szo

Re:Promise = Average (make that Bad)

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a similar problem. I've got a box running RH7.2, and it's a proddie machine. I've sawpped emails with promise a fwe times, and they say they are releasing source. But slowly.

Yes, but

[NorthDude]

When I ordered my DSL connection/modem, I asked what were their price on a static Ip address. The girl on the phone didn't understand my request (not surprising), but she had the amability to forward my call to an internal technician who had been able to answer my question and a few other one. Most people don't know how to connect to the internet, plain and simple. When you call, the persons who answers you have a nice little sheet or app with steps to follow to make it work. If they can't help you, they SHOULD forward your call to someone who can. I would never make any business, personal or not, with a company who just can't help you. I don't care if the first person to answer the phone can't help me, nothing personal because no one knows everything. BUT as a company, the one hiring them, it IS there responsability to have failover in case that there tech support couldn't help you. It is not the responsability of the employee answering the phone, it is the responsability of the company!

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup... I agree completely. I worked at a call center for a while so I have first hand experience at what a pathetic joke of a system these companies have in place for handling tech support. (Granted if the ISP is small enough they probably aren't outsourcing their tech support so someone else, but who knows these days.)

The guy/gal sitting there at the chair taking your call has absolutely no qualifications for the job they are doing. They take calls ranging from Televisions, Stereo Equipment, Fax Machines, to Computers. The manager who hired them screened them by asking a few few basic questions but at the end of the Interview all it really boils down to is whether or not they can read directions presented to them on a computer screen and acurately relay those directions over the telephone to someone. It doesn't matter if the directions have absolutely no bearing on the issue at hand. Which is why when you call in to these places to find out why their modem pool isn't answering, (i.e. the modem just rings forever), they'll tell you something like "Your password is case sensative and needs to be typed with the caps lock turned off."

These people don't know or care anything about computer systems what-so-ever. They make minimum wage and sit in cubicles doing crossword puzzles and gossiping to their co-workers. Insults mean nothing to them because they think you are just a stupid computer geek anyway.

When the calls get esculated to a "senior tech" the call goes to 1 of 2 people. #1. Someone else in the same group that you haven't talked to yet. You get a new voice on the phone and assume you are talking to someone more qualified. You're not. #2. The call will go "upstairs" to a group of guys who handle calls for every technical group the call center gets calls for. They generally have a better idea of what's going on in the world of technology but the pay sucks so the ones that take the stuff seriously quickly move on to better paying jobs leaving behind the bottom of the barrel.

I'm a "graduate" of call center hell. I got a lot of good experience working there while working on my education, I wont deny that, but I'd never do it again. You quickly become bitter and hatefull. You know it's time to quit when you answer all of your calls with your head laying on the desk and you speak in a monotone and offensive voice and you place your callers on hold for 15 or 20 minutes at a time while you "lookup information" hoping they will hang up so you don't have to listen to them any more. At first helping people is great. The "stupid questions" amuse you and you have a great attitude about helping people. 3 months later you start telling people they should either go take a class on how to use a computer or that they should just take it back to the store.

IBM Laptops/Toshiba Tecra laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Just about everything can be made to work, even before IBM shipped them with linux pre-installed options...I had personal experience with the 770 series, works great, everything. Sound, graphics - even the built in modem..

Of course, now that they are in with linux, the rest shouldn't be a problem...and if you can afford them, their new laptops ROCK.

The Tecra 8000 from Toshiba also rocks under linux. DVD drive works (though not the hardware mpgeg decoder) in either ide or scsi emulation mode. Resources are kind of a bitch, to get a modem card working took some adjustments to the pcmcia config file, possibly making a printer hookup not work - had to free a reserverd irq...

Sound died since the 2.4 kernels, oss free, no go, alsa, no go (not for me, anyway), so I resorted to non-free oss sound, works fine.

There is even support now for the internal-winmodem, though since I have the modem card I haven't played with yet, sposed to work but be picky/flaky. Go with IBM if u can afford it but don't scoff an old toshiba on ebay or something...