Windows Drivers Under Linux?

sniggly writes "The Inquirer has an article about how Montreal, CA based Linuxant has created a 'compatibility wrapper' allowing standard Windows NDIS 5.0 drivers to work on linux. After pointing to another project allowing windows printer drivers to work on OS/2 the author asks 'Are printer and network card drivers going to become, over time, a commodity with Win32 drivers one day the 'de-facto standard' run via wrappers?"

Comments

Re:Instability

[AKnightCowboy]

Most of the BSOD in Windows 2K/XP are caused by unstable drivers.

That's true. Unstable drivers and faulty hardware. People always complain about BSOD under Windows, but since Win2k you should never get a BSOD anymore unless your hardware is broken somehow. For example, I kept getting lockups and blue screens but I traced it down to faulty memory. Another time it was an overheating video card because the fan on it died. Win2k is actually one of the most stable operating systems I've ever run.

Re:Instability

[Lothsahn]

Erm, sorta.

You shouldn't get a BSOD often unless:

a) Your hardware is broken
b) Your hardware's drivers have bugs in them

I have also had windows BSOD once or twice in my usage because of actual bugs in windows.

I did get BSOD's fairly often, which traced to a memory controller. That of course was fixed with a replacement board, but I still get them.

For instance, until 44.03, Nvidia's drivers had some funky bugs in them for the Geforce DDR and the Geforce FX 4600... on both cards my systems would crash with errors in nv4.dll. The cards are not faulty. I have 3 Geforce DDR's and there is no reason to believe that they are all broken in the same way.

Matter of fact, WinXP BSOD'ed 5 minutes after I finished the install with a nv4.dll problem.

Also, many Dell systems have faulty USB drivers. Plugging in a USB disk can BSOD the entire system.

Now, you may say that this is not Microsoft's fault, but I would argue that it is at least partially their fault. For instance, the Nvidia drivers were WHQL certified. Microsoft stated that they were acceptable drivers for their windows system. I hold them partially responsible for certifying faulty drivers... you know darn well that if Nvidia relies on their drivers getting certified... Microsoft does have power here and I suspect that if they had not certified the drivers Nvidia would have fixed them. The problem is that the WHQL certification team probably has the usual Microsoft quality control standards.

As for faulty memory, you should run memtest86 (www.memtest86.com) It'll let you know right away if your memory (and memory controller) are working correctly, as well as testing the memory interface on the CPU.

For the record, I primarily use Windows. Linux doesn't play many of my online games, such as DAOC. I'm not bashing windows for the sake of bashing windows. I'm just stating that to say that it should never BSOD is incorrect.