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."

Comments

Difficult to maintain?

[garcia]

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...

Re:Difficult to maintain?

[mikeyrb]

But I would call it a step forward. I would like to see integration of sites listing working drivers and a site like this, where we see what doesn't work. If you're out to purchase something new, you don't know if someone's tried it yet because sometimes you just can't find it listed. It'd be nice to see just one page, yes this works, or no this doesn't. Even better, you could then look at the whole list and pick one that works. Or in the nature of the new site, see one that works for one platform and hope for the best that it will work for yours soon. Oh, and after the /. effect dies out, the site should probably maintain well.

My idea

[Stevyn]

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.

Re:My idea

[GreyWolf3000]

The proposed solution is DBUS and HAL. HAL is just an abstraction layer--it is a common library API that allows software to deal with hardware installation in a platform-independent manner. DBUS is a bit more sophisticated--from what I hear it's going to be an entire interprocess messaging system that will allow software to communicate with hardware via the HAL.

Essentially what this means is that pretty soon, you can plug in a USB camera and have your shiny Gnome desktop popup a window telling you that you have just installed a camera, and providing you with some basic configuration options.

The problem with a unified control panel is the various differences between distributions would make it impossible to maintain.

What I would like to see is more standards defining how files in the /etc directory should be placed and formatted. This would allow a control panel that doesn't know everything about each configuration file, but rather serves as a more advanced text editor with a tree view to browse through configuration files. It would of course provide documentation for each file (like what each option does).

Then we'd have a tool that both intermediates and advanced users would appreciate. It would also be simple enough to teach novices how to use (providing the documentation is good enough).

Re:Wow, looks like they'll need new hardware

[BoldAC]

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

Good idea

[fishbowl]

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.

Wikis need moderation

[tmk]

I have seen a project like this once before, it failed as foreseen. Someone put on a website, but he did not take much time to consider how users should and could use this list, how could it be updated and so on.

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.

Re:*raises hand*

[Stevyn]

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.

Re:Video cards

[oGMo]

Make life easy - somebody just please copy the entire list of video cards from Epinions or Cnet.

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.)

Re:*raises hand*

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:I like that idea!

[Paladine97]

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.

Re:Wow, looks like they'll need new hardware

[valkraider]

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. ;)

Oh come on..

[leathered]

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.