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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."
0 comments and it's already /.'d into the ground.
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...
Make life easy - somebody just please copy the entire list of video cards from Epinions or Cnet.
What's your damage, Heather?
It's not slashdotted, the link is just wrong.
clicky
Device: *
:p
Vendor: *
That was easy...
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Their servers dont look like there /. Compatible. I wonder if thats in their database?
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.
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. oh. sorry.
Actually later distros have mproved my situation, but I seem to pick the turkeys right off the bat.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
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 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.
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 ($200+/-) if that distro supported ACPI just as well as the MS operating systems.
What could possibly go wrong?
That touches on a problem that is probably going to make this project a lame duck. There are far more people out there who will give up or accept a compromise after repeated failures than there are those who keep going until they get things working. I suspect a large number of "x doesn't work" entries are more likely to represent "I couldn't get x to work". Clearly the latter doesn't necessarily mean that the device is incompatible with Linux, although it certainly implies there is room for improvement.
No harm in trying though. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Uh yeah video cards do work on the same plug and play concept. It's called VESA. And it sucks.
You can setup X to work with VESA just fine. Oh wait, you don't know how to do that? I wouldn't call it 'not' compatible just because you don't know how to configure X.
NVidia has some great binary drivers you can use with X. Download them from NVidia.com; an installer is included.
I have that very special GeForce 5200 and it rocks with Slackware-Linux. The NVidia Binary Drivers work just fine. If you can't get them to work maybe Linux isn't for you. The installer is really easy compared to other Linux hardware.
The card is not the best one out there but given the real cheap price it is a good value for the money. If you are like me and like to play Neverwinternights or any other 3D game (except maybe for Doom3) that is available for Linux you will have a lot of fun with this card. Most of these, rather old, games are fully supported at very high resolutions with this 50$ 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.
...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.
www.compaq.com
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.
So much for all those postgres zealots screaming about how it handles load sooooo well..
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Connection to database failed
could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host localhost and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
while executing
"pg_connect -conninfo $conninfo"
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"DBOpenHost [config db_host] [config db_user] [config db_pass] [config db_db]"
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"DBOpen"
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invoked from within
"DBRawQuery $query"
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invoked from within
"DBQuery "SELECT id FROM yakuwiki_page WHERE id='%s'" $id"
(procedure "checkPageId" line 2)
invoked from within
"checkPageId $id"
(procedure "show" line 4)
invoked from within
"show $page"
("show" arm line 1)
invoked from within
"switch -- $op {
show {show $page}
edit {edit $page}
update {update $page}
history {history $page}
diff {pagediff $page $rev}
upload {wikiupload
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("uplevel" body line 1)
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"uplevel main"
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
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.
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.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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