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The Linux Incompatibility List
Jonathan Lassoff writes "The Linux Incompatibility list is a wiki project that attempts to document hardware that is incompatible with Linux rather than list what is compatible. In the wiki, it is possible to add alternitives so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary drivers, publish specifications, or even better, publish open drivers."
It's not slashdotted, the link is just wrong.
clicky
It is slashdotted, even if the link is wrong..
http://www.haxwell.org
You *can* have good binary drivers. It's the interface between the binary drivers and the kernel that is normally provided in source form, and that needs to be recompiled against the target kernel.
Ask nVidia, VMware, and.. what's that modem with binary Linux drivers, can't remember.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Not always. I have some perfectly good parallel port midi hardware that no longer works in WinXP or Linux. It's precisely because nobody's written drivers that I can't use it. It's not like the MIDI spec has changed any.
I'm posting this using a desktop machine running Linux that's talking to a server running Linux via two wireless ethernet cards using Windows drivers.
Check out ndiswrapper. It's a surprisingly elegant system for letting you use WLAN drivers written to the NDIS standard (e.g., Windows network drivers) under Linux.
It's wonderful. It's simple and highly effective. It lets you use drivers written by people with access to actual technical documentation, it's small, it's adequately fast, it's easy to manage... it also lets me use my two network cards under Linux, which I can't do otherwise. (One's a RTL8180, which is unsupported under Linux, and the other's a ACX100, for which a driver does exist but which sucks.)
Didn't NDIS start out as a portable driver standard, anyway? Netware, OS/2 and Windows, wasn't it? What would be really elegant is to use some sort of code translation to allow the drivers to be used on non-ix86 machines...
Hardware makers could develop modules
:-)
Ain't this what we usually call drivers or am I misunderstanding your idea?
Because right now the problem isn't really (or only) that we do not have proper gui to support hardware (or should I say to support users) but really that not all hardware have linux drivers.
Your idea sounds ok, but when you say "Their drivers are just modules in this control center." you forget that this is only the visual part of the story. On the other part, the system need to know how to talk to said hardware, what feature it can use etc etc, and this is really what a driver do.
For example, there is many sound card out there, but everyone of them has different set of features. In order to be able to use my Audiophile 2496 I need and interface (a driver) which will "route" my date thru it and let me access its fonctionality.
I think that a universal control center may be a nice thing to have in the future, maybe not, but for now I would really like to just have drivers for all the hardware I have.
Sorry if this sounded pedantic, I don't know how much you already know about all this!
I'd rather be sailing...
No one knows, because there are umpteen different chipsets used in the DWL650 line. Early DWL650+ units had a prism2 chips, but later ones do not.
D-Link as the prime adherent of the business practice known as "reusing model numbers to confuse the customer". You have carefully examine the serial number to know for sure just what particular card you have. I had three DWL650 cards a month ago that had identical boxes, identical labels, and identical prices, but with three different chipsets. The only indication of the differences was a single letter on the serial number sticker.
Netgear isn't much better, though they do have the civility to mark the version number on the box. Of course, they still won't tell you what version number you'll get if you order online...
I've given up on wifi and am boycotting the entire technology until the manufacturers stop screwing over the customer. Even Windows users should be outraged, because they can't updgrade their drivers or firmware, because they will not know exactly what card they have.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"Jury" was a type of mast. Masts have rigging. Some guy named "Jerry" doesn't. He *built* things. Thus "jerry-built". Get it right, will you?
I have that very special GeForce 5200 and it rocks with Slackware-Linux. The NVidia Binary Drivers work just fine. If you can't get them to work maybe Linux isn't for you. The installer is really easy compared to other Linux hardware.
The card is not the best one out there but given the real cheap price it is a good value for the money. If you are like me and like to play Neverwinternights or any other 3D game (except maybe for Doom3) that is available for Linux you will have a lot of fun with this card. Most of these, rather old, games are fully supported at very high resolutions with this 50$ card.
I'd recommend it anytime, especially because it's passive (i.e. silent) and can be easily overclocked with nvclock.
Most digital cameras these days support both of these protocols;
The Kodak is probably one of them. If it is using another mode, or if one of them does not work well enough (typically PTP), switching to the other mode will fix the problem. This is a camera setting, not an OS setting.
This means; no special software for each specific camera. All PTP camera-aware tools work the same. All mass storage cameras work just like flash storage drives.
In addition, most distributions support linking known USB cameras to the /camera or /mnt/camera mount point automatically; plug it in and a camera shows up.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
ACPI is an open standard, but unfortunately, vendors' closed source BIOS implementations for the last few years are written against the Microsoft ACPI parser, bugs and all. Consequently, many machines fail to work at all with the Linux implementation (written against the standard) unless kludges or more relaxed syntax checking are used. This is not a failing of the Linux ACPI implementation or the ACPI specification. It is a Windows interoperability issue.
It is unknown how many machines have bugs in their ACPI BIOS code. The only way the ACPI developers find these and special-case them is when users mail in their bug reports and DSDT (check here), because the developers don't have access to every machine on earth to perform testing on. Even when a bug is found, it can only be worked around, because most system BIOS in the field are no longer supported by the respective vendors. So you'll see messages from the ACPI layer regarding syntax errors or known bugs in a particular BIOS, which the developers are helpless to fix in any way other than a special-casing.
Even worse is that many ACPI BIOSes return different values depending on which OS the vendor's ACPI code thinks you're running. Most of the time, any BIOS code path other than for an OS which calls itself "WindowsNT" is broken, so AFAIK, all ACPI layers simply spoof themselves as "WindowsNT" to the BIOS to avoid problems. Rather sad, isn't it?
As a final note, some vendors like Tyan, HP, Intel, etc are extremely active on the ACPI and LinuxBIOS mailing lists. HP has fixed ACPI-related bugs in their system BIOSes due to the Linux ACPI code rooting them out.
So the moral of the story is, don't assume poor ACPI operation on a specific machine is the fault of the Linux ACPI project. More often than not, it's the fault of the BIOS vendor not caring to implement the standard correctly beyond what it takes to get Windows up and running on the machine, which doesn't correspond 1:1 to whether or not they've implemented the standard correctly.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I agree that they should have done it on Wikipedia... therefore, I started it (link from Usability section of the Linux topic to a new topic Linux Incompatibility)
The list is empty since I couldn't get to the original server. So, as time permits...
Ha ha...
It's not IIS, it is of course, Apache with Rivet. We were in the middle of some work on the server, and as I commented elsewhere, I *just* created this and am still tweaking the software. It's still at the stage where I'm doing research for hardware to put in myself in order to make it a useful resource.
Neither the list, nor the server, nor anything else was ready to be published on slashdot, or anywhere else high-traffic for that matter. I guess I shouldn't have linked it on kerneltrap, but it was handling the traffic there no problem.
In any case, you can read more about the idea, and some other people's comments on it at here, which also has a link to the thread on the kernel mailing list:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3695
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
It is up to the hardware vendors to make sure their drivers are compatible with the linux kernel. If the vendors don't see a market need for Linux drivers, they wont spend the time & money to create them. Without drivers, the market stays small.
The easiest way for vendors to get and maintain Linux drivers is to release the specs or source code to the kernel developers and let them maintain it! But vendors are nervous about competitors learning secrets from the driver code about the internals of the hardware, so often they dont.
The rest of the problem is handled by Project Utopia
Wow, what a great idea!
Except for the fact that Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a tech support forum...
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Um, that's what ndiswrapper is. It currently builds as a module for ease of development but it would be trivial to compile it in to the kernel binary itself. It looks in a special directory for files describing the NDIS drivers, and if it finds the hardware, loads them and binds them. The end result is you end up with a bunch of standard ethernet devices. No userspace tools required anywhere, except for setting up the special directory in the first place...
Yes, it really would be possible to have an option in your favourite distribution's installer saying 'Install network driver from floppy disk'.
Because I just created the site a few days ago. It should not be on slashdot.
I hope it will work, because people will add their hardware there, and it will show up with google. I also plan to add things myself as I see them.
If you want a more informative article than slashdot, look at kerneltrap, where I made the mistake of linking to the thing in a comment:-/
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3695
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
But if I'm a manufacturer I have to decide what how to get the camera to work with linux. Do I try to get a driver in the kernel? Make one for gphoto or some other project?
Neither. Just make your camera a USB mass storage device or make it talk PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) so existing drivers can already talk to it.
Ditto for printers - make it talk PS or PCL and release a PPD file. PPDs can be used with any OS.
Have a similar protocol for scanners.
Drive manufacturers did this decades ago with SCSI and ATAPI. Seagate and Maxtor don't need to create linux drivers, just make their HDD talk ATAPI, or SATA, or SCSI.
Standards, folks. STANDARDS.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a Hardware guide. Expect it to end up on Votes for deletion soon.
And another thing, Slashdotters are abusing Wikipedia as a tool in nerd erotica in general, just look around. There is going to be some REAL cracking down soon.
See, that's your problem. "Broadcom", translated into common English, roughly means "screw the customer".
Though I have yet to find a Broadcom chipset wireless card that doesn't work under ndiswrapper. Of course there are downsides (can't use with kismet, not open source and still relying on windows drivers, etc), but at the very least it allows you to do wireless.
in addition to creating an entry to the mentioned wiki page, ATI and OEM-ATI owners might sign the following petition directed to ATI Technologies:
:-)
ATI Petition for Adequate Drivers in Linux
http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/
And yes, signatures are being added to this petition list in a very fast pace
Best regards,
Walter.