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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."
so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary drivers
Question? When did Linux start allowing binary drivers that were not kernel specific? Last time I checked, Linus has jury-rigged the kernel to only allow drivers compiled against a specific version of the kernel. This was in order to force hardware manufacturers to release the source code.
Personally, I think Linux should allow binary drivers. Most hardware is useless in a few years anyway, so what good is having the source? Compare that to the OS, where it can live on for decades.
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Actually later distros have mproved my situation, but I seem to pick the turkeys right off the bat.
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Ok. This incompatability list is gonna be useless...why?
Hmm...I wonder if my DWL650+ is incompatable. Well...I don't see it in the list.
I wonder if it's because it's compatable, or no one has assessed it yet!
Jee...I guess I'll STILL need to search a million websites, etc. etc.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
I'm probably going to end up with a troll mod but...
I think the first thing should be ACPI. ACPI support plain sucks under linux. I would pay the same amount for a linux distro as I do for MS XP pro ($200+/-) if that distro supported ACPI just as well as the MS operating systems.
What could possibly go wrong?
... which makes you wonder why they didn't just put up a few pages on Wikipedia for this. The infrastructure is already there and as long as they're not doing any really custom wiki coding (and it's not outside of Wikipedia's intended scope), they might as well let someone else do the hosting who has everything in place.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That touches on a problem that is probably going to make this project a lame duck. There are far more people out there who will give up or accept a compromise after repeated failures than there are those who keep going until they get things working. I suspect a large number of "x doesn't work" entries are more likely to represent "I couldn't get x to work". Clearly the latter doesn't necessarily mean that the device is incompatible with Linux, although it certainly implies there is room for improvement.
No harm in trying though. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
...of hardware that has released open source drivers several years ago and *still* doesn't work reliably in Linux. Take the Soundblaster, for example - a very common item, that still doesn't work a lot of the time, across multiple (all major ones, certainly) distributions. I duplicated this time and time again with my Soundblaster Live! card. IIRC, Fedora Core 2 and Mandrake 10 Official finally started working again, but I gave up on them after the myriad of other problems I had (none of which were driver-related). See the Linux's Achilles Heel article and the follow up.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
There are a lot of devices which aren't supported but don't need specific support. For example, most digital cameras aren't supported, but they act as USB storage devices, so you don't need anything special for them. I'm happily using an nVidia card at home with free drivers, and it works fine for 2D stuff, which is all I've tried doing. Devices often have extra features which aren't supported under Linux but which aren't necessarily good ideas anyway.
Maybe they just have a little more class than to dump a potentially large bandwidth load onto wikipidia.
Once upon a time, people on the 'net weren't a bunch of assholes, and would politely inquire before knowingly burdening your machines with a ton of bandwidth. (*cough* slashdot)
Or maybe, the info might be a little dynamic for wikipedia to handle effectively, I dunno.
This list could change daily, or even hourly.
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is incompatible"
No wait
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is supported with kernel patch 3432-231"
no wait
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is unsupported again" (patch withdrawn because of patent infringment)
no wait
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is supported from rev 2.6 and up, excluding rev 3.4"
etc, etc..
This list is a good idea though. I hope they're smart and put a good "cellphone/PDA" compatible interface on it. This is the type of search I'd like to do while standing in the checkout line of CompUSA.
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This is a feature, not a bug. Linux runs on more than x86, you know - but have you ever seen a binary driver for anything other than x86? Making it such a pain in the arse to get binary modules to work is an encouragement for companies to release source (which can be compiled on anything you care to run linux on, probably including your dishwasher...)
It sounds like what you're after is an operating system that positively encourages binary drivers and is only readily available on x86. And we all know how well that works...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Last week I had to return 3 webcams from 2 manufacturers. No support for linux at all; or even worse, a flat out refusal to release any form of specifics. I think it's outrageous.
We need this list. Maybe not for the most common hardware, but there is a lot of stuff out there that has no driver support for Linux (and other opensource OSes) at all. I rather know in advance there is no way of getting it to work, or when there is only an incomplete 'experimental driver' made from sniffing usb devices.
And then we could also reward companies that do make opensource-friendly products and drivers by buying their products, which hopefully has an impact on the other, windows-oriented companies.
One of the reasons the Linux kernel has improved so much, is so stable, and can scale as well as it can, is that when there is a technical reason to dictate a change, the changes is made. They don't have to support bad decisions made years and years ago (actually they do if it affects userspace applications, but if it's internal to the kernel, it gets killed with impunity). To pick a particular example from Windows, the GDI memory goop that Win95, Win3.x and Win98 had. When you ran out of that, your machine was cooked. It didn't matter how much RAM you had, that amount of that was relatively fixed. It was a stupid problem, that caused me no end of pain, but there it was. I'm sure Solaris has one. Well, heck, I hear the TLI/STREAMs interface is vile, but it was one of the two standard driver models that was easy to write. However, it had very poor performance.
The other thing that's nice about Open Source only drivers, is that there's one and only one implementation of a lot of stuff. Tons of network cards have essentially the same structure for a lot of the driver. All that gets refactored out into common modules for all drivers to use. If a bug is found in that shared code, it's fixed in all of them at once.
Linus doesn't support Binary interfaces, because he has to choose between making it easy for you to have a non-open driver, or for making it easy for him to make the Linux kernel be as good as it can be. I'm all for making Linux as good as Linux can be. You might want him to choose "support a driver model for the lifetime of a kernel series", but I just buy hardware that is known working with Linux. Yeah it sucks at times that I can't get a specific piece of hardware that sounds cool, but I get Linux for free. I'll take that trade 8 days a week.
Kirby
You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards. So you try to disable overclocking in the driver (presumably by making the driver reclock the card to the correct frequencies, thus undoing the work of any overclocking software). If you release open source drivers, it'd be pretty easy for hacked drivers to be released that allow people to overclock, even though you dont want them to.
The number of people who overclock their hardware is probably far below even the number of linux users at this point. I have never seen any evidence it has impacted sales of high-end products. The main concern CPU manufacturers have with overclocking is remarking, where an overclockable slower chip is relabled by a third party as a faster chip and then resold. That is both illegal and damaging to the company's reputation (because the remarked chips are going to be, on average, less reliable) so they take measures to prevent it. Thats not a problem with video cards since the only practical means to overclock them is via software.
I think the precise reason that OEMs are releasing closed source drivers for Linux is so that they can get in before someone tries to reverse engineer their hardware and pass off some shoddy drivers that cast their hardware or their development team in a bad light.
This is partly true, but it also represents a valid response to customer demand: They have customers who want to use their products under Linux, and they are providing semi-official drivers in the only legal way they can (see below).
The only drivers regular profit-making companies can support are closed source drivers developed in-house. As soon as you implement the code of other people or allow some random guy you don't know access to your CVS to do a few check-ins, you cannot claim to offer any support for the product whatsoever, because people who have worked on it are not your employees and you are not responsible for anything they do, and are consequently no longer responsible for work done on your own driver, which you would like to be able to legally own, support, endorse and distribute with your product as your own
This isn't a big deal really. You can require third parties to contribute code under a license giving you either outright ownership or very broad redistribution rights, and carefully control outside code contributions (see Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.); there is no reason that model can't be applied to drivers. There are two other main reason that drivers are not released as open-source: First, often times the driver contains source code which the manufacturer licensed from a third party and has no right to redistribute (this is the case with NVIDIA). Second, the driver can contain some highly proprietary intellectual property, possibly representing most of the value of the product (this is the case with most software modems). There is no way around the first case unless the manufacturer wants to completely rewrite their existing driver, and no way at all around the second.
What is most discouraging, generally, is not that hardware companies don't open-source their drivers; the driver is the hardware company's property and if they don't want to port it to Linux or release source for it, that is their right. The problem is when vendors won't even release specifications to their hardware to open-source developers. There are people who are willing to sign all sorts of restrictive NDAs to get access to specifications and write open-source drivers for hardware; a hardware company does not have to release the full specifications to be released to the public, only allow the final driver to be released as open source. In the past this was how most drivers for Linux were written, but, especially graphics card companies, are providing much less access than they were 5 years ago, even as more companies are paying lip service to Linux support.
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Sites like this which only list what doesnt work, and other such sites that only list what does work, all suffer from the same problem: you cant distinguish unknown from does/doesnt work.
The printer people (linuxprinting.org) have the right idea, the site lists every printer thats known, and wether it does, or doesnt work, how well, and why.
This way you can more easily tell the difference between 'my device is too new, nobodies tried yet' and 'the manufacturers a pest, itll never work' and the more common 'theres half a driver that mostly works, give it a go or wait a bit'
If the same philosophy was applied to all devices it would be a really useful resource