Novell Delivers Device Driver Breakthrough

An anonymous reader writes "Novell today announced a new Linux device driver process to make it easier for third party device driver writers to integrate their drivers with SUSE Linux." From the article: "The new driver process allows customers to obtain drivers independently of Novell® kernel updates and supplies a straightforward approach third parties can use when developing device drivers for Novell's SUSE® Linux Enterprise products. The new Linux driver process developed by Novell allows hardware and software vendors to provide Linux drivers and driver updates for their products to customers directly and transparently, in a way that is completely integrated with SUSE Linux Enterprise delivery and support."

Comments

Re:Something is breaking, that's for sure

[abradsn]

Yes that is correct, but at least there is a path to actually get a working driver. Before this, there was almost no hope at all to get a working driver installed in less than 4 hours.

For all the people out there that are about to go on about apt-get or some stupid distro, here this: give it up.
while (my-dsitro <= your-distro) my-distro++;

To illustrate, the reasons that Linux is not the dominant Operating system.

Linux should have the following priorities in mind to gain wider acceptance:

• We need to get a truly working pluggable driver model.
  
• We need to have a registry to track applications, and their installation paths, and installation parameters. (This will help with the install, uninstall, and dependency headaches)
  
• We need a unified configuration system and configuration user interface.
  
• We need a great GUI development IDE
  
• We need to not release products with 200 dependencies that change every 4 weeks
  

The only thing Linux has over other operating systems right now, is price.

The Flexibility open source should provide is hampered too much by the above listed problems.

Re:Kernel Building

[PenGun]

Cool be dependent then. If you don't want to learn that's just fine by me.

  Some people don't like having to depend on some organization to fix their problems but I guess that's just liberal-commie thinking, you know the strong independant ... oh hold it, that can't be right ;).

  I guess my ability to get almost any damn thing to run by fooling with kernel and drivers is just wasted effort. Hi ho ....

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

Re:Marketing blurb

[swbrown]

You can't magically evade the GPL by adding a layer. That's a good thing, as it keeps software Free.

Hi, there, Mr. Gates!

[mangu]

Please, Mr. Gates, you are paying a lot to these FUD and astroturfer experts, leave the technical details to them, OK?

/etc is a huge mess across different distributions. The X config can be found in /etc... or in /etc/X11... or in /usr/local/X11

Hmmm, look, Mr. Gates, /etc is pretty much the same in every major distribution. /usr/local is where packages you compiled yourself are installed, stuff provided by the distributions don't go there. But no user needs to be concerned about that, since all modern distros take care of that transparently without any user intervention. Only geeks who know what they are doing have any reason at all to install anything in /usr/local.

A user expects his system to be configurable by nice, friendly, intuitive and easy-to-use GUI apps that come with a nice in-built help section.

Yes, Mr. Gates, we know that. But Linux has this "control center" GUI thingie that does anything a user needs to control. It's only those weirdos who have been smoking too much of that stuff that got you nailed in New Mexico (you sure look funny in that mugshot, boss!) who use vi or emacs, anyhow.

However, we all know that sometimes we have problems that only the weirdos can solve, then they use vi to edit some stuff the same way our technical guys edit The Holy Registry. The difference is that the Linux weirdos have something they call /var/log/messages, to which our own weirdos haven't invented any equivalent yet; that's why when everything goes wrong we still have to format and reinstall while they look it up in Google and change one line in some file in /etc to get things working again.

there are quite a lot of reasons why so many programmers DEMAND the latest and greatest release of Visual Studio.

Ooohhh, THANK YOU, Mr. Gates! So you do realize how hard we in the Marketing & FUD department have been working? Does this mean we will be paid overtime?