Simplifying Linux Driver Installation

prostoalex writes "O'Reilly Network posts an update on Project Utopia that produced Hardware Abstraction Layer for Linux simplifying device changes. They also link to the Driver on Demand project on SourceForge, whose goal is to create a central database to enable Linux desktops download the drivers automatically when the user plugs in her new hardware device."

Comments

Tough to stay with XP

[JorDan Clock]

If getting drivers becomes that easy, I'll be considering atleast dual-booting. Drivers have always been something that have kept me away from Linux, but if they're as easy to find as plugging in a device, I'll switch in no time. Now, if only those manufacturers would put out some decent quality drivers, I wouldn't have much reason to stay on Windows.

Re:Tough to stay with XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Plug famous brand USB storage devices into a Fedora Core or recent Red Hat and it will appear as a user-owned mountable device immediately. No reading system logs. No trying to understand mount flags, it Just Works(TM)

It would work with the off-brand ones if they only agreed any kind of rhyme or reason to the USB device name strings... and in FC3 it'll probably just work anyway thanks to some extra magic.

I hear the same complaint with video cards, USB MIDI, you name it. And I'm mystified. I bought a Radeon 9200SE for a home machine, turned it back on, FC2 auto-detected it and everything just worked. Where's the "complicated procedure" and the "hunting for clues on Usenet" ? I plugged the USB headphones from a nearby iMac in, and they appeared immediately as an output option in my Audio player app. No I didn't have to "configure" anything, or "mess around with the command line". When you plug a Playstation 2 keyboard into my USB capable FC2 laptop it just works, as you would expect.

So put the "Linux will never have working plug and play" complaints in the same category as "Linux will never be easy to install" complaints. Nothing is perfect, but as usual Linux (at least outside roll-your-own distros for the nerds) isn't any worse than any other system.

A hardware abstraction layer?

[ogl_codemonkey]

What, like a kernel?

Re:Wating for this

[GreyPoopon]

too many egos in the way.

That's only part of the issue. Lots of people don't want a KDE and Gnome merger because of philosophical differences on what a desktop should be like. I do, however, wish that on many forked or duplicated projects people would take just a second to think about who, besides themselves, a fork (or duplication) would actually benefit. When the forked or new version provides no significant new features, it's probably doing more harm than good.