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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?"
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.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.
-... ---
they are not Open Source. I guess this is the obvious one to many... mode me down if you wish.
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
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.
That just because they were community developed, doesn't mean the company didn't give out specs and info to facilatate the community's work.
3com cards seem to work on everything
Recent Intel network gear
Recent Nvidia
3dfx used to
IBM (even before the Linux money, their laptops worked well)
Matrox 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.
If the game developers start to support Linux then the Hardware will follow.
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!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
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 :-
They've been pretty Linux-friendly in my experience for my home networking...
... 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.
Bad as it may sound, since they don't provide the source to their drivers, they seem to work seriously in improving them. I've been using them since my old TNT2 card, and the big problems present at the beginning have faded away to give place to a full featured, fast and reliable thing. I've also had answers to my mails reporting problems, which is always nice.
Speed is now at the same level of Windows, features seem to be there as well (I don't remember if everything works at every resolution yet or no), and over time they have become stable enough to be used as primary XFree drivers (in the beginning I used them only when I needed openGL support).
Given their work on the driver, I'm willing to live with their closed-sourceness. It's when it doesn't work and I cannot look in it to fix that I become less tolerant....
3ware 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+
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.
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.
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 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).
What is your Slash Rating?
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.
According to the sane USB page they release even preliminary specs on demand: http://www.buzzard.org.uk/jonathan/scanners-usb.ht ml.
:) (which I shall not name here)
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
the pun is mightier than the sword
- 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.fucktard is a tenderhearted description
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...
FWIW, Microsoft Keyboards are nicely supported under Linux, although not by the manufacturer (why need it anyway, when the BIOS itself supports keyboard input?)
¦ ©® ±
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.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.)
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
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.
--sig fault--
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.
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.
RedHat Hardware Channelse . tml ..)
http://www.redhat.com/marketplace/channel_hardwar
(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/
Check over at linuxprinting.org and you will see that they have a near perfect record for working with Linux.
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.
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 :-)
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."
...
-... ---
The M-Audio Delta series of 24bit audio cards have linux drivers. very nice audio boards.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Do they still exist?
Anyway, I remember they wrote all their own linux drivers for their scsi cards...
Torque.net develops their own drivers, usually with the help of reverse-engineering.
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
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.
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.
The truth shall set you free!
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)
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
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!).
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If the hardware is top end, and likely to be owned by Linux people (gaming graphics cards, hotrod modems, cool peripherals) then they are fairly likely to work, with obvious super-high end exceptions. Top end hardware also usually follows specs for standard stuff (like standard SVGA, etc)
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If hardware is low end, forget it. Most of it is manufactured in bulk for Windows only, may have some proprietary code where standards would have done, and is less likely to be owned by a Linuxer anyway. Exceptions below*
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Latest products : unlikely to work because drivers won't have had time to get integrated into kernel development, however modules may be available. Again, if it follows standards then it may work (with performance hit) with generic drivers anyway
I have seen 3Com mentioned, well there's a case in point where they are industry standard network card people. Loads of people have 3Com cards. Loads of people having certain hardware means it's likely to be supported, however....* Very popular shitty low end hardware may work due to good hacks by lots of owners, however reverse engineering isn't an exact science and strange hardware stuff means only hardware which is technically acceptable in it's I/O style will work.
Manufacturers who only develop for Windows are most likely to be found having market share in low end products. The top class lot are much more likely to work. Peripherals that are little more than I/O ports which are instruction driven from host processing (huge binary drivers required) won't work with Linux unless the manufacturer releases all the specs.
I would say that manufacturers make regular business judgements on all their support: because Linux doesn't have market share enough to make it a sales point to support "end user" hardware and they won't release code (because competitors making low end shit will steal it and obfuscate it as a Windows locked binary) but server hardware is supported rather more quickly, because the server market share for Linux is substantial enough.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
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.
Looks like "hit and miss" is missing an ;-)
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!)
I don't really mind double posts on
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).
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.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
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.
Organization? You must be joking..
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.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
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.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
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.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
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
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
utter rubbish
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.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Wacom does a good job of providing interface specs for its tablets.
Roey.
Also, many IBM machines run Linux - I wish all their laptops did!
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
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!
the history of the world
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..
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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...
drivers/scsi/ips.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers' - I got 492 lines, but that includes lots of redundancy, of course.
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
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.
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
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 !
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?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
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.
SBE makes T1/E1 and T3 PCI WAN interfaces with integrated CSU. Driver source is available for Linux and all three BSDs.
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 :)
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)
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...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
-- My Weblog.
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..
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.
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.
my sig
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.
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...
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.
-- Alastair
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.
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...)
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
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 opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
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.
What, me worry?
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.
Make that unqualified affirmative action minority "people of color" slacker drones.
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.
World of Anime
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*
Live web cams
Has anyone gotten a 2.4 kernel correctly working on one of these? 2.2 was fine. How about *bsd?
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.
... 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).
Well, perhaps
So while the OpenGL implimentation may be very good, the closed source nature of the driver means I'm forced to wait for an officially unsupported, binary-only driver, to be fixed someday, or I have to find an alternative. This seriously decreases the value of the NVIDIA driver and hardware for use where I work and live.
ATI does not suffer from this handicap, and while its OpenGL support may not be as good as NVIDIAs, it does work well, and without the system stability issues incurred by using NVIDIA. In addition, the free and open nature of the ati drivers insures that my hardware will never be orphaned, even if ATI has a change of heart (or financial troubles) down the road. The closed source NVIDIA drivers give me none of those guarantees (though the fallback nv driver helps, as long as you don't need digital out or multi-head support).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
..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.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
:) 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...
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
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.
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!)
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).
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.
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?
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?
Do you have the drm-kmod port installed? I thought that supported the Matrox line. My Voodoo3 was hardware accelerated after installing that..
Considering the upcoming commercial alliance between Microsoft and NVidia, I wonder for how long they will be realeasing Linux drivers.
Now I am sad.
Another hardware vendor worthy of note is Matrox. They've done a good job in supporting Linux, and deserve recognition for that effort.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
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
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.
Kodak is one of the real losers when it comes to releasing specs. Scratch them from the list, and add them to your blacklist.
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....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Alcatel has drivers for their speedtouch ADSL modems.
http://www.speedtouchdsl.com/
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.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
3ware.com
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
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.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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.
Your sig here!
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 !
The drivers for Prism/Prism2 chip based 802.11b cards was actualy better than the windows drivers from what I found.
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.
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.)
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...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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 ...
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
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.
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.
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.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
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.
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.
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.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
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?
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
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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.
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.
My G450+ works just fine with 4x AGP and OpenGL acceleration (without even having to use drm-kmod).
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
My nvidia TNT 2 Ultra - Perfect. .ps files in USB mode. no jpg, etc.
Aureal Vortex 2 - perfect
USR Modem - perfect
Netgear NIC - perfect
Epson C60 printer USB and LPT - Perfect in LPT, only prints
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
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.
---
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
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
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.
Ligaguinggligagiggagoogoogwillgo
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.
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
Some assembly required
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.
... well, I might need to edit the source. But just forget porting the binary!
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
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).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I haven't actually used their IDE-RAID cards, but everyone I've heard from speaks very highly of them.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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>
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.
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
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I will definately bookmark that for future reference.
-... ---
The 3Ware Escalade is indeed supported directly in the kernel since 2.2.15!
--
"I am feeling weird today, are you?" -The Great Mushkins
Francis Provencher
"What if the bird will
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.
Karma whorin' since 1999
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!
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
Democrat delenda est
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
~~ What's stopping you?
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.
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.
Democrat delenda est
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
If nVidia doesn't think it's worth it to fix the problem, you can:
So, given nVidia's model and the open-source model, which would you take?
Software -- especially operating systems -- is becoming a commodity. Companies that maintain "90% of users only want..." or "Best viewed with..." policies will not survive.
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
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
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.
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
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
Red Leader Standing By!
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!
I'd rather be sailing...