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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."
blahblah
so now, when ATI's bugfest drivers crash the computer, Novell is to blame?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Why is having shitty, flaky, unfixable, unsupportable binary-only drivers a breakthrough? Closed vendor drivers suck, they are designed to hide bugs in the hardware/firmware, and are written by people who don't know the first thing about the OS they are writing drivers for.
Hoho, Novell distributes (updates of) vendor-specific drivers for SUSE 10. Yeah, that'll cure the hunger in the world - not.
Way to innovate, Novell. Way to join the party half a decade late.
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All drivers already exist. Fucking Linux NOOBS.
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:
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.
Cool be dependent then. If you don't want to learn that's just fine by me.
... oh hold it, that can't be right ;).
....
... Standards and Practices !
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
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 ???
You can't magically evade the GPL by adding a layer. That's a good thing, as it keeps software Free.
Hmmm, look, Mr. Gates,
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
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?
Compared to that piece of garbage called a kernel SRPM that SuSE has been using, almost anything would be an improvement. Their SRPM called shell scripts in the SOURCE files, which turned on or turned off patches concealed inside tarballs in the SOURCE files, and relied on an RPM for compilation that was never published outside of SuSE (namely the kernel-package RPM).
That meant that to recompile a SuSE kernel, you had to unfold the SRPM to find the SPEC file, edit out the kernel-package requirement (which didn't actually do anything, anyway!), turn on and off individual patches in a set of shell scripts, and add or delete patches from the tarballs. This is, of course, insane and makes adding new drivers or modules into it particularly painful.
Couple that with SuSE's insistence in their YaST package management tool and kernel-installers that there can be only one kernel on a system, and that that kernel must be the running kernel in order to compile packages for it (which is particularly evident in the handling of NVidia modules) and you have a complete disaster for any new kernel that requires custom drivers for the hardware that you boot with, such as SCSI or SATA or USB or PXE or fiber-channel drivers.
Then couple in YaST's complete inability to handle a mix of the base OS and an update site's package, and you see why YaST is such a pathetic clone of the old Linuxconf package RedHat used to use and why it's fundamentally a bad idea.
It wouldn't be hard to actually use RPM the way it was designed, instead of the weird shell and other wrappers that SuSE insists on putting around these external drivers and putting their own weird management on top of the underlying RPM system. It relates to RPM the way Active Directory relates to DNS or LDAP: they broke the basic functionality to add unnecessary features.
It's not hard to do: RedHat and various open source authors have been doing this for years, with the NTFS and Wacom device drivers. There's really nothing new here.