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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."
This is going to be difficult to maintain. The numbers of unsupported hardware are huge. I just tried to add my digital camera (Kodak DX4530) but kept receiving an error that someone else was making a change at the same time.
As new devices are usually intended for a Windows audience I really doubt that this will do anything but tell people something they already know...
I had this idea the other day and I'm going to rehash it on this thread. Maybe it's redundant or overreaching, but I'll try and relate it in words anyway.
A set of standards called "Desktop Linux". From a PHB and marketing viewpoint, it makes sense. Nothing to do with servers or embeded systems or that old 486 dhcp server sitting in someone's basement. It's just a concept that represents the computer that sits in people's homes and cubical.
So the idea I'm kicking around is a set of standards. As far as the end user is concerned, the heart of this is a GUI interface similar to what distros include in their base install. The Mandrake control center comes to mind, but I hear YaST and Yum (I may be wrong on that one) are similar to this. I'm proposing a common "control center" where all the hardware that the user is concerned with such as scanners, cameras, mice, printers, graphics card, monitor, USB drives, Firewire drives, etc can be controlled and configured from. Hardware other than that like IDE controllers, USB controllers, internal hard drives, and other devices people generally don't have to worry about that are either hidden or not existent in this at all. This control center is independent of window mangers so gnome, kde, and icewm for example would not have to worry about it directly, just interfacing with it.
The goal is to be able to walk into a store like best buy, see a little sticker on the box of a printer that says "Desktop Linux Compliant" and to purchase it knowing it's promised to work with their computer. So they take it home, out of the box, plug it in and something in the background like hotplug detects it first. It passes that information along to the control center. The control center informs the user of it's detection and either downloads the driver or asks for the CD the manufacture included.
I know that sounds too good to be true, but let's pretend it's still possible.
The manufacturer doesn't have to worry about supporting all linux distros and platforms, just the "Desktop Linux" standard. Their drivers are just modules in this control center. Printer modules can then connect up to something like cups to do the rest of the work.
What makes this special is that as long as distros and manufacturers are compliant with these standards, everything should work properly. Drivers can be compiled for i386 or some other low common denominator or just delivered as source for simplicity.
Same idea for a usb flash drive. It's inserted and the control center mounts it and opens up a konqueror window and displays it's contents. It's up to KDE to provide that part. The control center just gets the information from hotplug, mounts it, and tells the window manager to open a window.
This whole concept is where open source should try to be. Central and enforced standards. The control center is probably just a bunch of interfaces for the distro, hardware maker, kernel, and window manager. But the goal is to bring them all together in one central location that's easy to use.
I'm not suggesting to rewrite hotplug, cups, samba, or sane, but just to agree on a simple yet powerful interface for the user to trust. Hardware makers could develop modules for the control center that would be standard across all platforms and window managers.
This still preserves one of the initial goals of linux to be customizable and compact. If someone doesn't want "Desktop Linux" then they don't have to install it. But distros would like this idea so they don't have to repeat the work SuSE and Mandrake did to get a scanner working. It also allows people to use lighter window managers because the hardware controlling ability in KDE is a reason I use it.
So that's the idea I'm kicking around. Comment as you wish. I'll admit I don't know the technical difficulties this might entail, but distributing it across hardware, distros, and window managers could make it feasible.
What happens if vendors just write some bloated rubbish driver just so they dont have to be on the list? Then we have badly supported hardware aswell?
In college I maintained the "Moan and Groan List" of hardware and software incompatibilities.
Old newsgroup posting...
That was around 10 years ago when HP, Packard Bell, iomega, and several other companies were learning that they could release cheap, buggy hardware and make an assload of money.
I got tons of traffic and was in several "best of" lists over the next couple of years. Several companies were trying to sue me but luckily several of my faithful users were lawyers and helped me through it.
Uptime was a problem because we had no way at that time of making money on the project. We bounced from server to server trying to keep up with traffic. I understand how these guys feel.
After a couple of years, I went to med school and didn't have time to keep it up. I'm such a shmuck... If I would have focused on that page instead of my medical career, I could have made millions, gone bankrupt, and then made money again!
AC
I never got over the frustration with the Wireless compatability list. See, the list is well done, and has lots of cards, and people seem to be working hard on it. The problem is, you cannot use the list as a resource to help you purchase a card! Many of the cards listed as compatable are either discontinued, have been changed to incompatable chipsets without changing the product model info, or else were only ever available in some regions.
What I always wanted, instead of a long list of cards that are not available, was a short list of cards that will definitely work, together with addresses of vendors who will sell such a card with a written assurance that the product I receive will indeed work under linux.
I was very upset when I bought a Broadcom device, thinking I was buying a Prism2 device. Even when you think you know what you're doing, you can get burned.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Another project on the same website was to find the best(!) linux distrubution in a wiki - you can see the result here. Do I have to mention that the best distribution was not found?
When you put on a wiki, you need clear questions and rules, you need moderators, who pick the useful infomation out of the chaos and set an reasonable structure for wiki readers and contributors.
This is true for graphics cards. Which you *don't* have the source for. On the other hand, you *do* have the source for a wide variety of network cards. All of which does very little good. Manufacturers of these cards revamp the interfaces every few years to meet the new standards in throughput and features. Drats, foiled again!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I agree. If the manufacturer has some secret technology that makes my scanner better than the competition and will only release a binary driver, then I'll gladly install it to use it. Take NVIDIA for example, they don't release the source code, but the installer "compiles" a kernel module so the user can take advantage of the 3d acceleration that they bought.
I'd rather see hardware supported by closed source drivers than getting stuck with a $200 paperweight because I bought a camera, and THEN switched to linux.
Binary drivers used to cause a lot of problems with windows. But Microsoft and the manufacturers got better and hence no more BSODs (despite the bad jokes that still exist here).
Since the kernel is open, I think it could be easier for manufacturers to develop drivers as opposed to writing them for windows.
Funny? Maybe in 1992. Nowadays the only video cards that matter are nvidia or ATI, and the latter don't comprise "the entire list" on either site. NVidia has very good linux drivers; ATI has shoddy ones.
So if you want to make it easy, just paste any hardware made by ATI and anything with "made for Windows" after it. (Even the latter list is shrinking slowly.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
That way, you can be assured that, if it's listed, it works.
With an incompatibility list, you don't know whether some obscure hardware actually works, or whether nobody's bothered testing it yet. Even if they have tested it, hundreds more will have to test it again because, again, it still won't be on the list, so they don't know whether it's been tested or just forgotten.
Not at all. This is to prevent people from running old modules against a new kernel version, where symbol names and other internals may have changed, thus resulting in potential crashses, instabilities, etc. As I understand it, you can turn this off by disabling kernel module versioning, but the module itself may refuse to load if it detects the wrong kernel version.
I haven't heard this, but I believe you. It's still an unnecessary restriction. Every other OS is careful to build in a driver interface that is independent of the OS version. Only Linux seems to force things right down to the level of kernel options.
Now if we had to switch drivers between major releases of the Linux kernel (e.g. 2.2 to 2.4), then there'd be no real issue.
Hardware is *far* from useless, even long after it's been "obsoleted". It's only the silly gamerz that require the latest and greatest... most people get by with fairly modest equipment.
It's not a matter of the hardware still being used. Usually you have old copies of software to go with it, too. The real issue is that hardware is a moving target. Chasing around new hardware items to create drivers for, is an exercise in futility. By the time you create the drivers, the hardware has already been replaced with the new model. This means that you HAVE to run old hardware to stay 100% compatible with Linux.
Why bother, when you can get the driver from the manufacturer? The driver can be used for as long as both the hardware is manufactured and Linux doesn't change its driver versions. Once the hardware is no longer supported by the manufacturer and Linux, you can continue running with the older copies of the OS software until an upgrade. That should give you AT LEAST five years before you can't upgrade your core OS.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
it's called microsoft windows
Uh yeah video cards do work on the same plug and play concept. It's called VESA. And it sucks.
You can setup X to work with VESA just fine. Oh wait, you don't know how to do that? I wouldn't call it 'not' compatible just because you don't know how to configure X.
NVidia has some great binary drivers you can use with X. Download them from NVidia.com; an installer is included.
Am I the only person in the world who's had almost zero issues with linux and hardware? With the exception two wireless cards that had proprietary chipsets, I have had zero issues with linux and hardware. I've used Slackware 10, mandrake 9.2 and 10.0, Suse 9.1 pro, College Linux, RedHat 7.3, Slax, Knoppix, morphix, -lost count of the rest of them- on computers ranging from PII AOpen computers to my AMD64 desktop to my Dell Inspiron laptop.
Actually, I'll amend that, I haven't gotten any of the modems to work (never tried, not counting dial-up access among my needs).
When I did run into my first issue, with supporting a wireless card running a TI proprietary chipset(meant to double 802.11b to 22mbps ONLY with SMC hardware), I went online and purchased a cheap Netgear card that has proceeded to work on every single distro I've tried without even having to configure it, it just worked.
People complain about linux hardware support, but I do a heck of a lot less work after installing linux than I do installing Windows drivers after a reformat.
Maybe I'm lucky **shrugs**
I wish you'd gone into detail on what makes ATI shoddy, because I'm running an ATI Radeon 9200 at home, and it literally blows the socks off the Nvidia card I had at work. My 9200's had no problems since day one. Install was a breeze, just dropped the card in the slot and powered up. I had to tweak XF86Config to get DRI, but that was hardly a problem. I guess I was just lucky that I had all the latest drivers and complete docs to work with.
Damn skippy - I still have the internals from every system I've built, all still running and doing useful things on the home network. My firewall is a old (now caseless) Celeron 300a (no longer overclocked since it's not a desktop) system with some surplus 3COM cards in it, I have my old Pentium MMX 200mhz system (again caseless) hooked to my stereo as a networked MP3 player, my file and general purpose server is an old K62 seutp, and I'm currently finalizing the setup on an old PIII/Pro 500mhz system someone gave me for use as a "media station" I'm going to use as a dedicated machine for ripping/burning CD's and talking to my digital camera.
:)
With forwarded X sessions I can run all these apps as though they were local to my desktop or laptop at once without using up valuable system resources better left to interactive processes. Old hardware rocks, I can't get enough of it
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Rule #1: If you are going to set up a website with ANYTHING cool, drop all /. referrels, or at a minimum send a "low bandwidth" version to people coming from /.
;)
Rule #2: make sure Google gets a hold of your site, then just use the Google cache.
The reason why DRI drivers work so well is because ATI didn't write them. But as you should know DRI only supports older cards such as your 9200. If you own a card that is only a little newer, then you are forced to use ATI's proprietry drivers. These, as everyone seems to know except yourself, suck ass. My 9600Pro gets a least 30% less fps in games than in Windows, not to mention the numerous glitches I encounter.
If you run Linux, you run Nvidia, it's as simple as that.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
The best way to get a compatible WiFi card is to buy a discontinued card on Ebay.
I don't think anyone was blaming the hardware.
The hardware is probably fine. The user or the distribution are much more likely to be at fault.
Occasionally I compile a kernel that breaks support for a previously working piece of hardware, but at that point I can regress to my previous kernel or recompile the kernel with correct options.
I believe in 2.6.7 my SBLive didn't work when the driver wasn't a module but that was more likely my fault.
Buttsex.
Yes, the 9200 is OK, but subsequently ATI have not released good drivers for 9500 and higher.
I have a laptop with a 9700 in it, and the XFree86 or X.Org drivers are not 3D accelerated. The download from ATI doesn't work with ACPI suspend / resume in my laptop, which kind of sucks with a laptop. Until recently they also just kind of crashed randomly, etc, etc.
At home I had an ATI 7500 in my wife's machine. I had endless problems with the binary drivers from ATI and eventually replaced it with an NVidia card which has been excellent, even if I do have to use binary drivers.
While I dislike the fact that the drivers are binary, the likely fact is that both of these companies infringe each other's patents and copyrights to a large degree, and if they open-sourced their drivers they would end up with lawsuits forever, kind of in a deadly embrace.
For this reason I don't expect to see binary drivers any time soon. Maybe a new company can come along, and produce decent video hardware, and open-source drivers, without infringing patents and copyrights. That would be great, but I won't hold my breath.
I'd rather have an olympus camera, I've always loved greek mythology.
So if you want to make it easy, just paste any hardware made by ATI and anything with "made for Windows" after it.
My last webcam said "Made for Windows" on it, even though it had an OV511 chipset, and thus worked on Linux pretty much perfectly. A lot better than my ATI graphics card works, anyway. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
>>>>>>>
Compared to Linux? Hardly anything.
Hey...my life, and work, is not centered on being a computer geek: I need something that works and is compatible. Linux just doesn't cut it on the compatibility side.
See...with Linux on the Desktop, it always something, isn't it? I mean, something that prevents you from hooking up that Digital Camera, enjoying that Sound Card or getting the Video Card to work at it's spec'd resolutions.
And...worst yet, the dearth of decent Linux applications is areal "Pain in the Arse". Sure...there's lot's of free Apps out there for Linux - they just also happen to be buggy, clunky and have poor user interfaces.
Like I said: Desktop Linux is free if your time is worthless.