Kernel Builders Appeal For Open Source Drivers

snydeq writes "The Linux kernel development community has released a statement emphasizing the need for open source drivers. The statement, signed by 135 developers, is aimed at preventing future vendors from following the closed source path. One holdout cited is Nvidia. The Linux Foundation has also released a statement in support: 'The Linux Foundation recommends that hardware manufacturers provide open source kernel modules. The open source nature of Linux is intrinsic to its success. We encourage manufacturers to work with the kernel community to provide open source kernel modules in order to enable their users and themselves to take advantage of the considerable benefits that Linux makes possible.'"

Comments

Tell that to Lexmark

[techno-vampire]

Lexmark not only doesn't provide the details needed to write OS drivers for its newer printers, it won't even provide proprietary drivers like ATI and nVidia do. I know, because when my sister moved from Windows to Ubuntu about a month or so ago, she had to buy a new printer because there wasn't any support for her fairly new Lexmark.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[NoobixCube]

Same here. My printer was a Lexmark, before I replaced it after moving to Ubuntu. It was a fine printer, when I was using Windows, but hardly enough to govern my choice of OS.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dotancohen]

Lexmark not only doesn't provide the details needed to write OS drivers for its newer printers, it won't even provide proprietary drivers like ATI and nVidia do. I know, because when my sister moved from Windows to Ubuntu about a month or so ago, she had to buy a new printer because there wasn't any support for her fairly new Lexmark. Did you write to Lexmark and let them know that? Here is their address:
http://www.lexmark.com/lexmark/sequentialem/home/0,6959,204816596_689444666_0_en,00.html

Write to the hardware vendors and let them know that we want to buy and use their products on Linux. Here are the addresses of some other hardware vendors. Copy the list and write to one every week:

Creative (Webcams) http://asia.creative.com/contactus/presales/

Logitech (Webcams) http://logitech-en-amr.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/logitech_en_amr.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

Nokia (PIM sync software with OpenSync) http://www.nokia.com/A4126575

Epson (Printers) http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/AboutContactUs.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes

Gigabyte (New motherboards should ship with Linux drivers) http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Company/ContactUs.aspx?CompanyWebPageID=6

Linksys (Networking equipment) http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Content_C1&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1114037291276&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[grusin]

man marketing

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[kauos]

I have a Lexmark color laser printer. Native linux support is pretty terrible for it, but it's a great printer so I bought a linux driver for it from TurboPrint (http://www.turboprint.de/english.html). As much as you hate buying a driver for a piece of equipment you've already bought, I found the price to be worth it.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[netcrusher88]

It's probably for the better if Lexmark just curls up and dies. I've never had a Lexmark printer I considered particularly good, and I absolutely hate their little toolkit app.

Notably the free printers HP bundles with their OEM machines suck too, but what do you expect for free...

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dotancohen]

Who cares? Why didn't she stay on Windows. She should have checked her compatibility status beforehand.

For most people, applications dictate OS dictate hardware. I prefer KDE, so I run Linux. I run Linux, so I buy an HP printer.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[sarts]

...

Notably the free printers HP bundles with their OEM machines suck too, but what do you expect for free...

Ubuntu is free too, and that works... so being free is hardly an excuse for poor quality.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[techno-vampire]

My sister preferred buying a new printer. Then, after she'd gotten her new printer working, she donated the old one to LASFS, this world's oldest Science Fiction Club, to be sold at auction. She got a new printer, somebody else got a used one with plenty of life in it, and the club got some money. A real win/win/win situation.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[netcrusher88]

I think you can bend that rule a bit when you're giving away a scarce product as opposed to an infinitely reproducible product, but good point nonetheless.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[debatem1]

I've actually liked the cheapo HP all-in-ones. I got one as part of a bundle when CompUSA went under, and since then have gotten two more (one for my grandparents, one for work use) and all of them work pretty well, especially for ~$40 each.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Anonymous Coward]

A binary driver is worse than no driver, because it removes much of the incentive to write a Free one.

But anyway, for printers, HP is the way to go!

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[hairyfeet]

That is why I gave up trying to switch any of my home customers to Linux,even though most are simply surfing/emailing/listening to music/etc and would have been perfect for Linux. But in my area the Lexmark all-in-one is king and there is no way that a customer is going to go out and replace a printer they are happy with just so you can switch their OS. Hell I can't even blame them,as I too ended up with a Lexmark all-in-one that was a gift from a client whose husband bought her a laser printer for her home office. It was like new and for the little bit of printing/scanning/faxing I do I just couldn't justify the cost and waste of throwing it out when it really works great.

Which is why I don't understand why we can't have an ndiswrapper for printers. After seeing a Broadcom "wireless mini-PCI card" which is nothing but a wire and a tiny firmware chip about 1/4 of your average pinky nail,surely it couldn't be that much more difficult. Considering how dirt cheap these things are I seriously doubt they bother changing the firmware between models,hell the probably just recycle the code over and over. And I wouldn't be surprised if all the cheapy all-in-one printers were just using rehashes of the same code.

There has to be a way to capture what the firmware is doing and send the signal to the appropriate Linux equivalent. The user could always tweak the printer output from the Linux printer dialog once it got that far,and I have noticed the Lexmark cheapy printers usually need tweaking anyway so it wouldn't even be anything out of the ordinary for the user. But sadly I am just a network and pc fixit guy and my coding is limited to the occasional VB app for a SMB client. And as always this is my 02c from out here in the trenches,YMMV

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[profplump]

Or you could buy a printer that supports PostScript. I know it's an evil Adobe abomination, but it's really easy to print to, commonly supported in both network and local drivers, and has a standard printer-definition format to allow selection of hardware-specific options without the need for a hardware-specific driver.

Honestly, in a day and age when even non-tech families have a home network it seems silly to use USB connections and hardware-specific drivers for printers -- just spend the extra $50 and get a printer that can operate with direct interaction from a host CPU.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[jimicus]

You mustn't confuse Lexmark Inkjet printers with Lexmark Laser printers.

The laser printers, by and large, speak well-known and reasonably standard languages like Postscript and HP PCL, and the build quality isn't too bad (though it's not a patch on HP or Kyocera).

The inkjets speak proprietary languages, are cheaply thrown together and designed to last about as long as 2-3 cartridges.

(And in the UK, Lexmark make a big thing about how you too can buy a printer from the same company that supplies 70% of the UK's top businesses. Technically correct, but it's a totally different division of the company producing totally different products).

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[MrMr]

I think it's interesting that this advice has been correct since the 1990's, when we were faced with the choice of buying a Sun printer or hooking up an apple laserwriter for half the price on our Sparcstation 1. That's 15 years of sustained no improvement at all. Good luck with the petitions...

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[ettlz]

PostScript's not an abomination, just an anachronism. I'd like to see more printers supporting PDF "natively".

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Anonymous Coward]

The sale was already made. The manufacturer has nothing more to gain.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[inasity_rules]

Add SIS to that list please! I want accelaration on my legacy card. They ignored my emails, but they seem to make it hard to contact them. Anyone have a correct email address?

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[inasity_rules]

Until the new owner fires up his ubuntu PC...

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[searlea]

The manufacturer might want repeat business...

They're not selling suicide bombs.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dangitman]

The sale was already made. The manufacturer has nothing more to gain.

Nonsense. Consumer-level printers get replaced very frequently. They had future sales to gain (or lose).

Likewise, they have gained poor word-of-mouth, or lost positive word-of-mouth referrals. And it's pretty widely acknowledged in business that word-of-mouth is the most powerful means of advertising, and a real driver of sales.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Markspark]

use HP LasetJet 4 ppd , works like a charm on OS/400 with the Optra S - series..

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[sarts]

Well, I am familiar with the 'rule' that you can ask more in return for a scarce product then that you can do with a product which is widely available. And, good-quality products are usually scarce (with the noticable exception of F/OSS), but I doubt the rule can be applied the other way around.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Bert64]

When it comes to buying printers, i typically look towards HP...
They provide open source drivers for their printers and even the all in one printer/scanner combo devices.

Aside from HP i would consider postscript network printers, i recently had such a device from Samsung and it worked well.

I actively avoid Lexmark and Epson due to their lack of open drivers.

Incidentally, my old HP scanner/printer combo only works as a printer with OSX Leopard and Windows Vista due to the closed source drivers having not been ported. It works perfectly with an up to date Linux installation since it was possible to just recompile the drivers.
On the other hand, i'm having major trouble using saned (network scanner support) with my macbook as a client to the linux print/scan server, local scanning on the linux box is flawless.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[cheater512]

Buy HP.

Open source drivers on Sourceforge, written by HP with full support.
I have a HP multifunction center. Everything works: printing, scanning, faxing - even the memory card reader can be used on Linux. :)

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dave420]

Unless they start getting those emails in sufficient quantity, they'll just be replied with the usual boilerplate response. They won't think it's worth their time to make drivers for only a "few" people.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[mrchaotica]

Or you could buy a printer that supports PostScript.

Does such a thing exist for less than, say, $250?

I know that last time I looked, I had to give up Postscript to get a (network, laser) printer in my price range. I ended up with Brother HL-2070N, which is okay except that it still seems to require a driver on each client even when printing over the network, and it supports PCL instead of Postscript.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[silas_moeckel]

A little over your price range but I've purchased several Xerox Phaser 6120's for 300 delivered to me door. Compared to that brother it's got color and it is postscript and networked. Even can accept an internal hard drive for fonts etc.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that if everyone considers this a hinder to sending those emails the quantity will NEVER reach "sufficient" volume, yes?

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Jamie Lokier]

If it supports the current version of PostScript, then it does support PDF natively.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[jon207]

When you encounter such a problem, go to the store which sell you the device and ask to be refunded. even if the law is not on your side, the vendor can refund you to avoid losing a client or to avoid you to begin doing a scandal in the store. I know consummer protection laws are less effective in such countries than here (france) but here vendors are obliged to refund you if you return things you have buy in a certain time, so one thing linux users can do is to buy things that don't work to return them to the vendor. When vendors will be tired of that, they will ask manufacturers to make drivers.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Machtyn]

HP is doing a lot to tighten control on their printers, though. That cheap, sub-$100 printer? You can't easily share it out on the network (in Windows). They write their drivers specifically to prevent that. Also, their ink prices are quite high compared to the other quality brands out there, such as Brother or Epson.

My favorite is the Brother MFCn series of printers. They include the document feeder tray for the scanner, excellent phone line recognition faxing (i.e. it knows when to pick up or when to let a human/answering machine pick up), and it has ethernet, all for around $150. When I bought this printer, I looked at all the others and some had the feeder tray, but not ethernet, some had ethernet but not the feeder tray. And the few I found that did have it all were easily $300+.

Well, I didn't mean for this to come out as an advert for Brother. Anyway, that's my opinion. Also, for what it's worth, I've not been a big fan of HP since the late 90's. (Their HP-48GX was a great calculator, though.)

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Spy der Mann]

Consumer-level printers get replaced very frequently.

Because they were designed that way! Once, we sent our Samsung for repair. The repairman told us that they got broken very frequently, and he recommended us to get an HP instead. So we went to the store, and the salesman told us that HP printers got broken very frequently. He recommended us to get a Samsung instead! :(

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Fri13]

Linux is free, and ubuntu is semi-free. Ubuntu includes closed source drivers... but I know you didn't speak about the freedom as speech, but as beer. Ubuntu is free because it's Linux distribution but freedom has nothing to do with quolity, it's the whole system what company/community builds and with what merits.

So, it's not about price, it's not about freedom, it is question about skills...

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[LWATCDR]

Why in the Kernel.
That is what drives me nuts. Why do we have to have stinking web cam, printer and goodness knows what else drivers in the Kernel! Yes I know Linux is a monolithic kernel and that is why but good grief that just seems like a bad idea.
I didn't think that printers did need to be in the Kernel I thought they used a CUPS driver but I will admit that I don't mess with printers on Linux much.
Wouldn't it be better to move some drivers out of the kernel? I mean should a bad web cam or printer driver really take down a system?
I really think that Linux needs to offer a stable binary driver interface and offer a microkernal like interface for some less critical drivers.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[LWATCDR]

"A binary driver is worse than no driver, because it removes much of the incentive to write a Free one."
Unless you want to print and not have to buy a new printer.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Gazzonyx]

Yeah, if their open source drivers are like their Windows drivers, they'll install themselves as root and remove entries for starting, restarting and stopping the service under /etc/init.d (for you SysV guys) or /etc/rc.d (for the BSD guys).

Seriously, HP drivers install themselves in Windows as a service that cannot be stopped or removed by even an admin account. You have to do the old 'at time /interactive cmd.exe' hack, and then crash it and restart it thing to become Local System, just to stop the service.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[mrchaotica]

You must have gotten them right as they were being discontinued. In terms of normal prices, Xerox wants $350 for a printer that's relatively shitty.

In other words, not only is it out of the price range to begin with, it doesn't even count.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[lostjimmy]

Not only do they not provide Linux drivers, they also don't provide x64 drivers for some of their printers. My father gave me his Lexmark printer after buying a nice photo printer, and I have not been able to get it to work with Windows XP x64. I guess it's probably my fault for buying x64 in the first place.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Lisandro]

Don't sweat it - just get a Samsung laser printer. I've recently got myself a ML-2010 b/n (arround $100-$120 in the US) which, besides being dirt cheap, is well built, very fast, provides a one-touch toner save mode, and has native Linux open source drivers; install the driver, add your printer in the CUPS web configuration page, and you're good to go.

It's been six months now of continuous use without a hiccup - in fact, it's still using the bundled (half-load) toner cartridge.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[greenzrx]

If it used ink-jet technology, the manufacturer had everything to gain. like disposable razor blades, the manufacturers make most, if not all of their money on ink.

If you no longer use the printer, you have no more need for their ink.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[cerelib]

Well said. This comparison can be made with many companies making both inkjet and laser printers. Laser printers are much more likely to use standard interfaces, but watch out for the new consumer range ~$100 bw lasers. That new market is starting to use some techniques from the inkjet market. In general, unless you really like printing pictures (which is barely an excuse given the on demand printing many professional shops do now), you should just buy a laser printer. I have vowed never to go back to inkjet and it has been a great decision.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[jimicus]

Well said. This comparison can be made with many companies making both inkjet and laser printers. Laser printers are much more likely to use standard interfaces, but watch out for the new consumer range ~$100 bw lasers. That new market is starting to use some techniques from the inkjet market. In general, unless you really like printing pictures (which is barely an excuse given the on demand printing many professional shops do now), you should just buy a laser printer. I have vowed never to go back to inkjet and it has been a great decision. There have been laser-based Winprinters for years, but generally only at the very bottom end of the market.

However, in the last couple of years I've seen laser printers which sell for £3-500 which have Windows-only drivers. Canon and Epson in particular are guilty of this one - the days when you could fairly sure that over a certain price point it was pretty much guaranteed to support Postscript are gone.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[ichigo 2.0]

If HP's windows drivers are any indication, I would not dare install their drivers in Linux, open source or not!

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[tlhIngan]

Or you could buy a printer that supports PostScript.

Does such a thing exist for less than, say, $250?

I know that last time I looked, I had to give up Postscript to get a (network, laser) printer in my price range. I ended up with Brother HL-2070N, which is okay except that it still seems to require a driver on each client even when printing over the network, and it supports PCL instead of Postscript.

For the Brother line of printers, you want support for "BrScript" (BrotherScript) - for PostScript 3, it's called "BrScript 3". It's effectively a PostScript clone (since PostScript is trademarked, and Brother does't want to pay). But for all intents and purposes, it's PostScript. They even supply PPD files to configure your OS's PostScript driver correctly.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Bert64]

I haven't tried their windows drivers, but the mac ones were pretty bad.
The open source ones on the other hand, really are just drivers that interface with cups and/or sane, and other than that pretty much just get out of your way. No stupid utility programs, no background services... Seeing as they're open source, if such user hostile functionality ever existed in them, someone would soon strip it out anyway.

I will however look at Brother printers, since someone pointed out they also make open source drivers available.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dave420]

Very much so. That is what I was trying to get at, without incurring the "oh no he didn't" kneejerk reaction often employed on slashdot.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[lgarner]

"it's really easy to print to, commonly supported in both network and local drivers, and has a standard printer-definition format to allow selection of hardware-specific options without the need for a hardware-specific driver."

Wow, that does sound evil!

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[PitaBred]

Except that with ndiswrapper, it's a standard NDIS interface. Printers have no such standard interface, so there's no way to write a wrapper in the same way.

Printing isn't easy because printing companies haven't made it so.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[ckaminski]

They are not. HPijis is a great package for using HP printers in Linux.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[ckaminski]

I'll never forget the time I bought a $48 HP deskjet at CompUSA. The salesdroid comes over trying to sell me the warranty package for replacement.

Him: Would you like to buy an extended warranty with that?
Me: I'm good man.
Him: What if your printer breaks? You can get a one year coverage policy that'll replace it.
Me: Really? What's it cost?
Him: 50 dollars
- me looks at printer price tag -
Me: For that price, I could just buy a new printer and have two dollars left over...
- him walks away -

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is an application? I thought it was a GUI.

I thought apps were like open office writer, firefox, photoshop, things like that. I know that KDE also installs certain apps, but most of those can be added if you are using Gnome so what is the point.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Tacvek]

I have found the HP standard printer system to be absolutely abysmal. It installs a bunch of crap (The "hp director" suite). And guess what, some HP printers and scanners will not share a single HP director suite, resulting in two copies of a bunch of bloated useless software that does not even generally work right. HP does not appear to have any way to download just the actual drivers for the printer. (The true drivers, not the drivers plus monitoring programs and other crap). Basically, after seeing how poorly HP does consumer printers I plan on buying Cannon printers in the future.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Blakey Rat]

How many years has it been? I think it's time for the mountain to come to Mohammad on this issue.

If you want drivers, there's one thing you can do: Make it insanely easy to write drivers for Linux, or make it insanely easy for Linux to run existing Windows drivers.

Money talks; right now, companies don't write open source drivers because there's no money in it. Maintaining their drivers is more expensive, and there are very few customers (harsh but true) who actually care.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy things you know will not work and then return them saying that they did not work. Are you nuts. We are better off emailing/ snail mail writing the companies asking for drivers. I'd be surprised that there isn't a way to do automate it. Send an email or two everyday to company XYZ asking for Linux drivers for their products. Waisting our and the stores time and $$$ on buying products that we know will not work is pointless.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Tacvek]

No standard interface? My understanding was that the Windows drivers provided a file detailing capabilities and settings. Windows XP adds these to the print properties dialog. When printing the object to be printed is passed to the driver via the GDI interface, along with the values of all the settings selected by the user. The driver converts the GDI document to its native language and passes it on to the transport layer driver through another standard interface. This step allows the different physical transport layers (LPT, file, USB, windows network printing, and even the standard Unix print server system.)

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[techno-vampire]

Good point. However, we made sure that the bidders knew why the printer was for sale and that it wouldn't work with Linux.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[techno-vampire]

Most companies find it easier to make the specifications public and let somebody else write the OS drivers. It's good PR, good for sales (granted, Linux is still a minor market, but it's growing.) and doesn't cost them a dime.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Aramil]

I kind of did last year.My family bought a new Lexmark printer, not compatible with Linux and even with Mac.So I wrote an email asking why while the whole world is starting to pay attention to Linux and its users, Lexmarks insists on releasing drivers only for windows. Their answer (which I m afraid I deleted it so I cant paste it here) was that the company does not intend to release drivers for Linux machines in the near future.Period.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[techno-vampire]

I don't think you understand. We didn't buy the printer for an Ubuntu box and find that it didn't work. We installed Ubuntu as dual-boot on a Windows PC and found that the existing Lexmark printer wouldn't work under Linux.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[DanielJosphXhan]

I'm going to start a business selling incompatible hardware to clueless Ubuntu users. When they donate them back to my newly-founded charity, I'll auction them off to the ever-expanding pool of clueless Ubuntu users. It'll be like perpetual motion, except with money.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[debatem1]

That is uncomfortably close to the conversation I had with them- except instead of pointing out the price, I pointed out the giant "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE" sign outside their front window and declined.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[hedwards]

I bought a used laserjet a while back and I just use postscript. The only problem with the printer is that it's got a tiny amount of memory which will run out fairly quickly on weird jobs.

But in terms of reliability, I haven't really had any at all. It's just a solid printer. It's the Laserjet 5MP, IIRC.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[richlv]

actually, most if not all scanner drivers are into sane (userspace application), most if not all printer drivers are into cups (userspace application).
the reasons... those probably are a mix of historical and technical ones. but i wouldn't say drivers are neadlessly crammed into the kernel.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dotancohen]

Add SIS to that list please! I want accelaration on my legacy card. They ignored my emails, but they seem to make it hard to contact them. Anyone have a correct email address? The SIS website has this to say regarding end-user support:

We do not sell any products directly to end users so we do not have a staff dedicated to end-user technical support. If you are having a problem with any SiS-based product, please contact either the PC or board manufacturers or the retailer of your product. However, they do have a list of hardware manufacturers on their site with contact information at this address:
http://www.sis.com/support/support_tech.htm

Which brand is your card? What type of card, by the way, NIC?

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dotancohen]

Very much so. That is what I was trying to get at, without incurring the "oh no he didn't" kneejerk reaction often employed on slashdot. So, did you write to them? Please do. Copy the list of hardware manufacturers and write to one a week.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[hairyfeet]

That was the way I heard it to: that just like"winmodems" the OS does all the work through a standard interface (in this case GDI) and the actual "hardware" is pretty much as bare as you can get. maybe someone with some decent debugging tools could catch what is actually going on between the OS and the printer? Because as far as processing power goes those Lexmark cheapy printers don't have any so it HAS to be going on in the OS,and I can't see MSFT writing special interfaces for all those cheapy printers.But that is my take on it,YMMV

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[inasity_rules]

ASUS onboard graphics, SiS 740. The kernel developer has a site where he states " There is no DRI support for the SiS 315/550/650/651/740/661/741/760/330," since SIS won't release documentation. This is a problem with SIS, not ASUS. Its a useless card, but ASUS did not supply AGP or PCI express with such an old board, so its all I got.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[call-me-kenneth]

Luckily, Lexmark printers are totally shit anyway.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[call-me-kenneth]

If you can't afford $250 for a printer you're probably better off writing it out by hand anyway.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[techno-vampire]

...the company does not intend to release drivers for Linux machines in the near future.Period.

Consider this: one happy customer will tell five people on the average, while an unhappy one will tell ten or more. How many thousands of computer people either have read our complaints, or will before the discussion gets archived? Not only is this bad PR for Lexmark, it's bad PR directed at the people most likely to be recommending what printers other people and business are using, which means it will have a disproportionately large effect. I must admit, however, that it probably wouldn't have happened to a nicer company.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Grishnakh]

No, Linux is doing it the right way. If you had any idea what you were talking about, you'd know that scanners and printers don't have kernel drivers at all. Printer "drivers" (also called "filters") are in userspace, used by CUPS. Scanner drivers are also in userspace, used by SANE. If these are USB devices, the only kernel driver used is the generic USB subsystem.

A stable binary driver interface has already been argued to death, and it's not going to happen for a good reason: it makes it impossible to optimize or change many things about drivers in the future. Plus, it encourages binary-only drivers, which cause you to wind up with the mess that is Windows, where you have to throw away perfectly good but unsupported hardware just because you updated your OS. How many times have we heard about people who threw away their sound card because they upgraded to Vista, or who can't upgrade from Win98 or NT because some obscure piece of hardware their business relies on doesn't have newer drivers since the manufacturer either abandoned that product or went out of business? With open-source drivers, you don't have this problem; the drivers get maintained and updated along with the rest of the kernel.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Grishnakh]

You can't afford $250 for a printer, but you can afford to buy new $30 ink cartridges every month or so?

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[FLEB]

Consumer-level printers get replaced very frequently.

Lexmarks, extremely so.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[uniquegeek]

The right way doesn't matter, which is the point. Purposefully planned obsolescence boosts sales to a large degree. It's a golden goose for hardware manufacturers, especially if they're in cahoots with other vendors. You have to give vendors a *really* good reason to give up their golden egg. It usually requires a *better* golden egg, or at the very least, another one.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[mrchaotica]

WTF? The HL-2070N that I said I had (but which you apparently failed to read) is not an inkjet! It's possible for there to be a laser printer that doesn't support Postscript*, you know.

(*but see other reply about BR Script)

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Grishnakh]

So far, Linux isn't getting "in cahoots" with any vendors in a way which undermines its users. Even so, many vendors are coming around, providing Linux support, open-sourcing their code, etc. Why? All because their customers demand it. Linux's marketshare is still small compared to others, but what kind of idiot tells 10% of his potential customers to take a hike? (Even worse, because Linux isn't usually sold preinstalled, and frequently is simply downloaded for free, no one really knows just what Linux's marketshare is.)

Linux users need to stick to their guns, and forget about this stable ABI nonsense. Microsoft hasn't even been able to make it work, despite their enormous interest in stable binary interfaces, because it mucks things up so much; they keep changing their driver ABI every so often. The vendors already have a good enough reason to give up their golden egg: a small percentage of the market, but still very significant number of customers. If that's not good enough for them, it's good enough for one of their competitors.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Grishnakh]

Whoops, sorry. That's what I get for reading too quickly.

I don't really see your problem, however. No matter what kind of printer you have (PS or not), you have to set up each workstation on the network to be able to print to it. On the Postscript ones, you just don't need to mess with a separate driver file.

If anyone really wants a Postscript printer cheap, though, you can get older HP LaserJet printers on Ebay for next to nothing. My 2100M can be found for $50, supports Postscript, and uses $25-30 cartridges which last for 5-6000 pages. Newer, faster models can be found for $100 or so.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Novin]

Samsung works good. They have Linux drivers but they are not needed, open source drivers works great.

http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=Samsung

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[rootooftheworld]

Hmm.. an advaced open source driver framework for *nixses, at best already known and used by manufactureres. How 'bout I/O Kit from the XNU kernel porting is not that hard, is it?

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Blakey Rat]

Hmm.. an advaced open source driver framework for *nixses, at best already known and used by manufactureres. How 'bout I/O Kit from the XNU kernel porting is not that hard, is it?

No, porting is not "that" hard. But they're still not going to bother if the cost of porting is greater than the income from supporting Linux which, in nearly all cases, it is. If porting was nearly free, or if Linux just ran the Windows drivers, then you'd suddenly have a whole boatload of drivers you don't have now.

In any case, you can't have an elitist super-geek "porting isn't that hard, you just suck at computers" attitude if you're trying to work with people. You'll just alienate them and end up right where you started.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[rootooftheworld]

First, that was a real question,since i am definatly no super-geek, i cant even figure out how to set my screen brightness, i was asking how hard is it for a developer/team. Second, why do you think i propose lexmark/place-vendor-here to do anything, i KNOW they wont do anything. My idea was that the FOSS community uses this excelent driver framework, so that means THEY will do the porting, which im pretty sure is easier than supporting ALL those in kernel drivers. All the vendors have to do is release Mac drivers, and we'll reuse them as is.
</crackpipe>

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[Anonymous Coward]

Or tell that to Samsung.

I own a ML-3051ND printer. It's a simple (hardware emulated) PostScript printer. All it needs is a small PPD file to function with Linux. Instead they give me their bloated and buggy Samsung Unified Linux Driver, which actually works by translating PostScript coming from CUPS to PCL and then sending it to the printer (a PostScript capable printer!). The SULD consumes hundreds of megabytes of memory and a lot of CPU time (it uses a sloppily customised, highly inefficiant and buggy ghostscript clone to achieve most of its work). During installation SULD modifies some system files, used by other programs, God knows what happens if those files get "unmodified" during a system update, or used by a program in a way not anticipated by Samsung. Unlike a PPD, which is plattform independent, SULD only works on x86 and there is only rpm:s available.

I've made a working PPD by modifying and merging PPDs from some of their old Windows installations. It actually works better then the originals, because I coded around some bugs in the printers interpreter (don't we all love programmable printers). Now it actually works without any hickups (knock on wood) and it is possible to print with photo quality, which previously only was possible if you used the printer as a PCL printer under Windows. I've also made all fonts already embedded in the hardware available for printing (they wasn't in the original PPDs).

It has cost me a lot of time.

It's legal for me to use my PPD file, because I live Sweden, where it is legal to make modifications to software and hardware that you own, in order to make it work as intended (ie as the salesperson said it would). It is not, however, legal to distribute those modifications (because they are derivate work), which sucks.

PS. I can't even access Samsungs homepage from home, because some of their pages use Flash that won't work on Adobe Flash for Linux or PowerPC OSX. Their phone support has answered all my questions amasingly incorrect. They are really making it hard for anyone outside the Windows realm.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dotancohen]

This is a problem with SIS, not ASUS. SIS insists that they do not sell to end-users, so they do not have to support end users. I think that they are right. Pressure ASUS to pressure SIS:
http://usa.asus.com/aboutasus.aspx?show=3

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[inasity_rules]

Thanks, I guess thats the only option available.

Re:Tell that to Lexmark

[dotancohen]

KDE is an application? I thought it was a GUI.

I thought apps were like open office writer, firefox, photoshop, things like that. I know that KDE also installs certain apps, but most of those can be added if you are using Gnome so what is the point.

I should have said "software dictates OS".

No Linus?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Interesting that Linus himself did not put his name to the statement.
One might argue that the Linux Foundation's endorsement is sufficient and that Linus's signature would be redundant.
But if that were true, why did Theodore Ts'o put his name on the statement? He is part of the Foundation's management.

Re:No Linus?

[BostonVaulter]

Thats so that there can be 165 signatures rather than 164

Re:No Linus?

[pembo13]

I suspect Linus specifically likes to take no (public) stand on these things, and I don't blame him. People use his name for so many different things as it is, even though, interview after interview he states that he is just an engineer and doesn't really care. I myself care, but that's besides the point.

Re:No Linus?

[somersault]

Could you please sign this petition for people to do all my laundry and assorted housework please? I've got 394 signatures so far! How can the world refuse?

Re:No Linus?

[FireFury03]

Linus has made his opinions on the matter pretty clear in the past...

Re:No Linus?

[Lysdestic]

Call me crazy, but whether he has made his point in the past or not, he is still a developer - not god. It seems strange that he doesn't sign, especially considering how important his name is in the community.

Re:No Linus?

[FireFury03]

I'm not arguing with this. I'm as surprised as anyone that his name isn't on the list - I'm just pointing out that the "maybe he wants to be neutral" arguments don't hold much water since he has been quite clear on his position previously (and it is anything but neutral).

Re:No Linus?

[DaveV1.0]

How about I call you stupid instead? He did not sign because he does not agree with it.

If his name and words are so important in the community, why doesn't the community listen to him more?

Torvalds called banning binary modules "stupid," and told kernel hackers they should base decisions on technical merit, not political agendas

Re:No Linus?

[Lysdestic]

And likewise, I'll call you a dick in return, but in the end that would get us nowhere.

You'll have to excuse me for not knowing the opinions, stances, favourite colours, television shows, and favourite insect of the ever-holy creator of the Linux Kernel.

I know, I know, because I use Linux and his voice is important I need to be a walking encyclopedia of his brain.

For the topic at hand, I'll admit I was incorrect in assuming that he was for binary modules - I can give you that much. However, following the discussion, one could probably see how I came to that conclusion. Person A states, "Wow, Linus didn't sign." Followed by, "His name is thrown about too much, maybe he wants to stay netural." from Person B. And finally, culminating with Person C stating that he has made his stance pretty clear. I'm not that far off in thinking, "Well, since he has made his stance clear, and he is important, why not sign it."

I had just woken up, so yeah, the option that maybe he didn't like them escaped my mental grasp at the time. However, as I said before, just because someone uses linux, they shouldn't be expected to know every opinion the man has, and definitely shouldn't have someone speak down to them simply because they came to a logical conclusion whilst following a discussion.

Re:No Linus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus and the Linux people are well known for their pro-blob stance.
If you want real freedom move on to OpenBSD. Theo gets the hardware vendors to release specs for everyone. Linus gets NDAs for him and his buddies.

Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applications.

[dotancohen]

While I'm all for open source and regarding hardware drivers I wouldn't want it any other way, let's not forget that open source does not have to be pushed around at the application level at the expense of usability. Professional-level applications are critical for the use and expansion of Linux, and proprietary software vendors should be encouraged to develop their software for Linux, not alienated by being badgered to give away their source code. Currently, there is a heated discussion on the Debian list regarding PCB and CAD software availability. One camp (me) is encouraging users to write to software houses and to request that they port their software to Linux, with the other camp rejecting all contact with proprietary software vendors unless it is a demand for the source code. Currently, myself and other engineers cannot use Linux at work because we must run proprietary engineering software, such as Solidworks in my case. For those who want to help, please write to these companies and let them know that we are interested in their software on Linux:

Intuit (Quicken, Quickbooks) http://www.intuit.com/contact/ (requires registration)

Adobe (Photoshop, Flash CS3 Professional, Captivate, Dreamweaver, Studio) http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Sony (Vegas Studio) http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/corporate/contacts.asp

Autodesk (Autocad) http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=1073074

SolidWorks http://www.solidworks.com/pages/company/SolidWorksOfficeWorldwide.html (requires registration)

Sage (Act!) http://www.act.com/company/contactus/

Nuance (Dragon Naturally Speaking) http://www.nuance.com/help/contact/

hardin-soft (BM-Win Plus (mailing address correction software)) http://www.hardin-soft.com//forms/feedback.html

Daz (Bryce (3D modeling and animation)) http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/support/rnlogin/-/?p_sid=vOwOJN6j&p_accessibility=&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=&p_li=&p_next_page=std_alp.php (requires registration)

ArenaNet (Guild wars): http://www.arena.net/contact.php

Ironclad Games (Sins of a Solar Empire) http://www.ironcladgames.com/contact.html

Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform-us.xml?gameId=0

Firzxis (Civilization IV) http://www.firaxis.com/support/

Electronic Arts (lots of games) http://www.info.ea.com/company/company_prlist.php

My personal problem is that I need Solidworks, so for emphasis I'll repeat their address here:
http://www.solidworks.com/pages/company/SolidWorksOfficeWorldwide.html

Please write to these companies and let them know that we need their products on Linux. Copy the list and write to one company a week. Thanks.

what is the use of this?

[at_slashdot]

Does begging really work? I mean asking people doesn't usually solve anything, you need to either show them a carrot and/or a stick... not sure if Linux has enough of either (yet)

Re:what is the use of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The carrot would be showing them that the number of units they'd sell would pay for (and exceed) the salaries spent during the development of the drivers.

Re:what is the use of this?

[DaveV1.0]

This isn't begging as much as it is demanding.
"I want open source drivers! Gimme gimme gimme!."

Re:what is the use of this?

[LingNoi]

The drivers already exist all they have to do is release them. There has been numerous statements by organisations that will code drivers for companies, free of charge so I don't really see what you're talking about.

I don't understand nVidia

[cerberusss]

I don't understand nVidia and other companies. One of the arguments is that the driver makes the difference between higher- or lowerpriced cards, thus open-sourcing this stuff will make the differences go away. Now I've worked with hardware engineers making FPGAs and ASICs -- I don't see why these graphics cards simply read their config from an EPROM or a small piece of flash, thus letting the driver not make any difference at all.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[s4m7]

EPROM costs more than software bits. Besides, EPROMs are easily hacked too.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[PhrostyMcByte]

The graphics card industry is cutthroat. The hardware is only part of the story - the drivers also do a lot of optimizing. They are probably worried competitors will use their own tricks against them.

Drivers compile shaders into something the video card can run - maybe they think their compiler optimizes better. On Windows at least, nVidia drivers will try to use SMP to prepare a few frames in advance for more efficient streaming.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Rufus211]

Drivers don't make the difference between the high- and low- end cards anymore. It used to be that the card would report a device ID, and then the driver would enable/disable features based on that device ID. This allowed both software mods and simple board mods to switch device ID in order to enable Quadro / FireGL features on GeForce / Radeon cards.

That's not the case anymore, which is why you can't find any mods for recent cards.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Sycraft-fu]

No the driver doesn't make the difference between high and low end cards. There is always a BIOS change at a minimum (videocards have their own BIOS). There are three reasons why nVidia claims they can't open source their drivers:

1) They incorporate third party proprietary code. This is almost certainly the case. I'm betting that some or maybe even all of it isn't secret, but it is still licensed none the less. That means they'd have to either change the driver to leave those features out and/or rewrite the code themselves which could involve some expensive clean room/dirty room techniques. Remember that they can't play the Xvid game of "Well we don't distribute it compiled so don't need to pay a license." Ya that won't won't work for a company who is providing the code for the clear purpose of making their cards work. They'd get sued (and they'd lose).

2) Their drivers are one of the things that make their cards more attractive than their competition. nVidia and ATi are locked in a major battle for computer marketshare. This is fought in terms of performance, whether raw performance at the high end or performance per dollar in the midrange. They are interested in every advantage they can get over one another. Well those advantages can come in software as well as hardware. For example nVidia has historically had very good OpenGL performance on Windows. All things being equal, an app would run equally well in either. ATi has not, DirectX has always performed better. Well if ATi got at nVidia's source, maybe they'd use those tricks to make their drivers perform better.

3) Special things like PhysX support. Coming out very soon (you can already find betas floating about) for Windows are drivers that will support hardware acceleration of the PhysX physics middleware engine on GeForce 8 and up cards. nVidia bought Ageia and has been working on this. They intend to use it to help move graphics cards. So game devs buy PhysX to handle their physics. Unreal Engine 3 uses it, for example, it is a major competitor to Havok. Well then those games will be able to have special hardwrae accelerated feature if they want... on nVidia cards. You have an ATi card you are out of luck. Of course if they GPL'd all that, ATi could take it and use it. They'd have to release any modifications, but they could still nab all the code and make their cards also do PhysX.

Now I'm not saying any of these are reasons you should agree with, please don't argue with me about them I don't work for nVidia I'm not making the rules. I'm just trying to help you understand why they aren't interested in open sourcing their drivers. With something like a network card or RAID controller, the drivers are generally pretty simple and are just a tool to make the hardware work. Thus there isn't really anything in them to protect and most companies probably wouldn't mind them being open if they really stopped to think about it. Their competitors would gain nothing from selling them anyhow.

That's not the case for GPU drivers. They are a large part of the picture in terms of performance and user experience. Thus improvements to them can give your cards a competitive edge over the others and thus nVidia isn't so interested in releasing them. Hell it can be real simple things sometimes. I used to have an LCD monitor with no scaler controls. What that meant was any image you fed it that was not at its native resolution, it stretched without regard for aspect ratio to full screen. That sort of thing bugs the shit out of me. I want aspect correct scaling. However, it wasn't a problem. nVidia cards can handle that, and I just told my card to do it.

At the time though, ATi cards couldn't (dunno how it stands now). That means that I more or less had to write off ATi so long as I kept that particular monitor. I wanted a feature that only nVidia could deliver. If nVidia's drivers had been open source, well perhaps ATi could have just grabbed the scaling code (it seemed to be driver based, not hardware based) and used it.

So it is a complex situation. I'm not defending nVidia's handling of it, just trying to help you understand why they do as they do.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

EPROM costs more than software bits. Besides, EPROMs are easily hacked too All modern video cards already have EEPROMs on them.
In fact, that's precisely how both nvidia and ati differentiate their "professional" cards from their "consumer" cards.
Ease of 'hacking' apparently isn't much of a concern because cards from both vendors have been 'upgradeable' in this manner for more than a decade.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Mattsson]

This would be circumvented.

1. Put Quadro/FireGL card in computer
2. Have a modified driver save the content that it reads from the EPROM into a file
3. Put Non-Quadro/Non-FireGL card in computer
4. Have a modified driver read the file instead of the EPROM
Viola. Your cheap gamer-card is now an expensive professional CAD/CAM-workstation card.

It's already been done with proprietary drivers via stuff like the SoftQuadro hack
The problem is that it's not the card doing something special due to special drivers, that could have been hardcoded.
It's that the drivers act upon information read from the card.
"Oh, so you're a Quadro-card. Well, then I'll fire up my Autocad-optimizations and use multi-threaded code."

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's the business pricing model. Rather than merely having one price and one set of features, and accepting the business that this balance will provide, this allows NVidia and companies like them to simply scale back the features to gain customers with less money to spend. And doing it as a driver, rather than as a hardware difference, tremendously eases manufacturing requirements. We've seen this for decades in all sorts of products, such as a lot of DEC computers from decades ago that required only a few minutes with a soldering iron to perform some very serious hardware upgrades.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Lonewolf666]

All probably true, but I think the obstacles are smaller than you think.

1) If getting permission from third party vendors to open source the code does not work, a vendor can still release hardware specifications and let third parties develop an Open Source driver. Getting a complete driver is nice, but not absolutely necessary. People have tried get the information through reverse engineering before, so there are some developers willing to program drivers from scratch.

2) It might be possible to release a new, "simple" Open Source driver that shows how to access the hardware and provides basic functionality, but lacks the special tricks.

AMD/ATI seems to do a combination of 1) and 2), and we'll see how it works out. If their Open Source driver reaches halfway decent performance and stability, my next graphics card is sure to be an ATI.
 

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

With something like a network card or RAID controller, the drivers are generally pretty simple and are just a tool to make the hardware work.

The examples you mentioned are anything but "generally pretty simple".
Do you actually have any experience developing device drivers?

The more I know about driver development, the more I believe that the common Internet user talking about such topics hasn't a clue at all.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[mpe]

I don't understand nVidia and other companies. One of the arguments is that the driver makes the difference between higher- or lowerpriced cards, thus open-sourcing this stuff will make the differences go away.

If that were the case you'd expect to see hacks for getting a higherprice driver to work with a lowerpriced card. Removing any hardcoded restrictions in such a driver is probably trivial compared with removing DRM from the typical game.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

so it's basically vendor lock-in.
the way i see it, the driver should do little more than interface the OS with the card, not do a load of fancy tricks on top of this.
the counter argument to this is, if nvidia were indeed working their magic in the driver then releasing it OSS would mean that others could benefit and you wouldn't be stuck using their hardware. instead of locking you in, they'd have to compete for your money by actually improving their hardware (which is the way it should be).
as i say, the driver shouldn't be a lock-in tool, it should be just a piece in the puzzle linking the card to the kernel and nothing more.
finally open sourcing would improve the stability of the driver. i don't subscribe to this "many eyes" theory in so much as people scan the code for bugs. nobody does that. however, having the code open means that when a bug is found (e.g. the security holes that have existed in the past) then we aren't at the total mercy of the vendor to patch it up (if they indeed feel like it). and yes, this does happen. i've actually submitted patches to small projects with help from the development community. open sourcing the driver also means they can include it in the kernel source tree, meaning that they can hand over at least some of the work to the kernel development team (compatibility issues for example).
to top it off, it's a great marketing exercise (how many people are pledging to go to ATI cards when the drivers are stable enough?).

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[mpe]

There are three reasons why nVidia claims they can't open source their drivers:

This isn't what they are being asked for. They are being asked for specifications, there are people perfectly prepared to write drivers.

1) They incorporate third party proprietary code. This is almost certainly the case. I'm betting that some or maybe even all of it isn't secret, but it is still licensed none the less. That means they'd have to either change the driver to leave those features out and/or rewrite the code themselves which could involve some expensive clean room/dirty room techniques. Remember that they can't play the Xvid game of "Well we don't distribute it compiled so don't need to pay a license." Ya that won't won't work for a company who is providing the code for the clear purpose of making their cards work. They'd get sued (and they'd lose).

None of it's secret since they make all sorts of binaries available. Indeed having multiple binaries for the same piece of hardware may make reverse engineering easier.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[mikael]

For professional CAD, the entire system (hardware + software) has to be certified that it would run correctly for a good number of hours without any failures (memory leaks, lockups, floating-point exceptions). What an engineer sees with the latest workstation must match exactly with what the first software version did 20+ years ago.

Professional CAD systems require multiple view windows. Consequently hardware clipping of windows is required. This can be skipped for consumer cards as there will probably only be one screen sized 3D rendering window.

All of this costs money in terms of quality control and licensing, which can only be recovered through price differentation.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[jellomizer]

Simple nVidia makes a open source driver. Knockoff company makes a closely competing product. Now to improve sales they read the open source driver code for the nViida card. then put in firmware a compatibility layer for the driver. So they don't need to maintain drivers, and it can be used everywhere. So nVida having to price it more because they did the R&D while knockoff company can make it cheaper because they copied all of nVida work. That is why they do things like that. Besides Linux has less then 2% market share, especially on the desktop so why spend money investing in linux if only a small percent say 25% of that 2% will use their product.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[funky womble]

This isn't what they are being asked for. They are being asked for specifications, there are people perfectly prepared to write drivers.

Hooray, at least someone gets it. Let me guess, you actually tried to read the average vendor driver...

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so if they GPL their drivers, and the competition uses that code to leap-frog them, that enhanced driver code from the competition is now available to them, so they can now go and leap-frog the competition. Oh, the competition used GPL code and didn't release the source? Now they have a nice big cudgel to use against the competition...

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Bert64]

Then maybe the manufacturers should stop ripping their customers off like this...

Selling exactly the same card at twice the price? That's ridiculous... If they want to charge twice as much for a card, put twice as many shaders on it or whatever... Actually earn that money.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Jamie Lokier]

There are three reasons why nVidia claims they can't open source their drivers:

This isn't what they are being asked for. They are being asked for specifications, there are people perfectly prepared to write drivers

Sure, but the same reasoning explains why they won't provide specifications. They don't want people writing open source drivers - they will lose their competitive edge if those drivers catch up in features with the proprietary drivers, but run on other vendors cards too.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when the competition studies the code and then clean-rooms it into their non-GPL drivers, in which case you've just let your competition catch up with you (or surpass you) for free... worse than free because you provided the information for them via your spent money in salaries.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious - how many shares of NVDA do you own?

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[mrchaotica]

So release a GPL driver that doesn't optimize! I don't even care if my framerate is a little low compared to Windows; I just want it to at least work!

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[3p1ph4ny]

Games don't have DRM, they have license keys like any other software.

The difference with games is that the license key can easily be faked for some games, but if it's an online game that talks to a server (i.e. WoW, Guild Wars, Diablo II, HL2 etc.), you can't sign on unless you have a valid key (i.e. one that you actually purchased, not one you generated).

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Austerity Empowers]

Drivers continue to expose the hardware design to the users. When you write device drivers, you put a lot of your knowledge about the architecture of the chip into it. That information can be used against you.

Maybe a day will soon come where a video card API is just something like OpenGL, and conceals all the dirty magic of the chip from the OS, but there are a number of technical obstacles blocking that for now.

I don't agree with closed source drivers, but then neither do I agree with offshoring jobs and having western companies attempt to maintain equal footing with countries that don't have any of our limitations, regulations and restrictions which improve our quality of life at a very real monetary cost. It's protectionism, but for me, it's the lesser of two evils. Fix the labor problem first, then the device drivers will follow.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[bradkittenbrink]

Fair. From what I've heard though, ATI/AMD isn't releasing their optimized drivers. They're releasing open source reference drivers. There's no reason nVidia can't do that.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Special things like PhysX support. Coming out very soon (you can already find betas floating about) for Windows are drivers that will support hardware acceleration of the PhysX physics middleware engine on GeForce 8 and up cards. nVidia bought Ageia and has been working on this. They intend to use it to help move graphics cards

Say, whatever happed to Glide....

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[znerk]

From what I've heard though, ATI/AMD isn't releasing their optimized drivers. They're releasing open source reference drivers. Yeah, like they're not going to be optimized in the open-source community. I'm looking forward to the day when the lightbulb comes on, and they outsource *all* their software development to the open-source community. All it would take is to implement a simple instruction set between the hardware and software, and then let the open-source community have the software end. Given the chance to tinker with a high-powered graphics card, I don't know many hackers who wouldn't *immediately* begin looking at it with higher framerates for their favorite game in mind, or producing better (higher-fps or higher-quality) video output from their favorite media player.

I know I would.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[pilbender]

All modern video cards already have EEPROMs on them. In fact, that's precisely how both nvidia and ati differentiate their "professional" cards from their "consumer" cards. Ease of 'hacking' apparently isn't much of a concern because cards from both vendors have been 'upgradeable' in this manner for more than a decade.

I thought this was a little bit of a stretch. But a little Googling popped up some interesting results. I haven't had a chance to look at this card but check this out: http://www.guru3d.com/guide/quadro-modify/

Seriously, this is so cool and I never thought about it before. Thanks for the tip!

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Grishnakh]

Simple nVidia makes a open source driver. Knockoff company makes a closely competing product. Now to improve sales they read the open source driver code for the nViida card. then put in firmware a compatibility layer for the driver. So they don't need to maintain drivers, and it can be used everywhere. So nVida having to price it more because they did the R&D while knockoff company can make it cheaper because they copied all of nVida work.

Yep. This is exactly why Intel keeps all the drivers for its CPUs closed-source, because it would be pretty simple for another company to make a knock-off CPU and sell it for a fraction of Intel's price.

Oh wait...

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three reasons why nVidia claims they can't open source their drivers:

This isn't what they are being asked for. They are being asked for specifications, there are people perfectly prepared to write drivers.

Whilst true, it is also 100% irrelevant to discussion on an article called 'Kernel Builders Appeal For Open Source Drivers'.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[rootooftheworld]

EARN MONEY? what planet are you from?

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Mattsson]

What they charge you is the extra work of developing pro-quality drivers and the cost of adding support for professional engineering and modelling software.

The hardware cost the same to produce no matter how many man-hours and licensing fees you spend on developing drivers.
They could of course sell you the card and the license to use the drivers as separate products, but then they would face the problem of people pirating their drivers instead of buying a license.

Re:I don't understand nVidia

[Bert64]

The drivers are the same too...

I don't know about you, but i strongly disagree with being expected to pay more to get a product which isn't artificially crippled...

Another example is xp pro vs xp home, xp pro was developed first and home actually had additional development work to make the cirppled version, yet it's cheaper?
It's not like a physical item where a later cheaper item is actually cheaper to produce (eg ps3, newer versions omit the ps2 hardware, component prices have come down, and some of the chips are built on a newer process resulting in higher yields per wafer and therefore cheaper costs).

It's ridiculous to have a cheaper product where the manufacturer has gone to great expense to cripple the product...

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[mazarin5]

Be that as it may, this is an appropriate place for the kernel developers to focus their attention.

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[alxtoth]

You've got it backwords regarding drivers: hardware vendors sell hardware, and "give away" the drivers so that people can actually use said products. As there will be more Linux users, so there will be incentive for providing drivers. As in Linux there are so many distros, it makes no sense to offer "closed source" drivers. And there are other operating systems which are not Linux, for example the BSD family

Same goes for software: if there will be enough demand, there will be more software for Linux. Even closed source. For example there is Intuit for Mac OS.

But instead of pushing water uphill with those software companies, why don't you look for software that does equivalent things on Linux (open source, or proprietary) ?

open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Icy_Infinity]

There is only one thing holding back Linux from being used more wide-spread.

Gamers, the Linux community just doesn't care for them. But that is wrong, just wrong. Gamers are the reason why computers are the way they are nowadays, without good games to play on our electronic devices I guarantee that computers wouldn't be a big as they are today, and that's something that Linux has always failed to do bring us top-shelf gaming

having open source graphic drivers would be nice but i don't think that is the true problem for games on Linux

there true enemy that needs to be defeated before Linux even has a chance at becoming mainstream:

Games for Windows

The fug-tards at Microsoft pay off every last PC game maker to put their dirty label on everything even the damn game reviews have that garbage label on it for god sakes.

They do it because they know no one else stands a chance in the PC gaming market. Stop them please stop Microsoft and there proprietary-ness. Defeat games for windows and Linux will be main stream, because freedom and openness shouldn't be a standard just for big iron. Theirs little guys like me that would love nothing other than to give windows the old heave-ho but can't because where all locked down in a homeostasis environment.

Also running in an emulated environment just doesn't cut it - it could be possible but WINE just can't do it for some games. Normally the games that don't run are the most proprietary ones sadly but there's still room for them in the sphere that is Linux. Help make a home for gamers where there not locked and bogged down by corporate greed. crack Games for Windows and please dear god make "Games for Linux" a reality

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[mrsteveman1]

DirectX is the real problem there i suppose.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[dunezone]

Its numbers not games. Windows is the dominant OS, unless Linux starts taking a 30-40% share of the market, its still an underdog.

Now, if your a developer with limited funds, would you build both a Linux version and a Windows version? No. Companies that can do this are ID Software and Blizzard because they have the resources to accomplish this. Remember, its not just building the game, its also supporting it later on.

You could apply this theory to the application area of Linux also.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[FeepingCreature]

Eh, it's hit and miss. I can play Half-Life 2, the episodes, Max Payne 2, Deus Ex, C&C 3, GTA San Andreas, Psychonauts, Freelancer and Dungeon Keeper 2 without significant problems.

From my point of view, the number of games that work is bigger than the number of games that don't.

Also, just to be pedantic: WINE is not an emulator. It's a reimplementation. Meaning, it doesn't emulate Windows, it is effectively a Windows.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[debatem1]

So, I guess you'll be writing DirectX for Linux, then? And yes, I see your point. I just wish I didn't have to. Gamers make my teeth ache.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[houghi]

I would say the most important part is pre-installation.
Now Linux has to compete with pre-installed systems. Imagine how easy it would be for the end-user to go to the store and buy it.

This would put the burden of testing the hardware and provide drivers on the people making the PC. They will the buy only hardware that they can support, which will lead to drivers being written for them, otherwise they won't sell them.

This will mean more people with Linux, which will mean gaming companies will write the game in Linux as well.

Remember how Windows became as big as it became? Pre-installation!

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[lordofthechia]

True, though it would be nice if we could start convincing game developers to use OpenGL and SDL at the very least.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Antique Geekmeister]

And NVidia i a real burden this way. Their driver installers for Linux move aside your existing your OpenGL libraries, without notifying the package manager. This means that your next software update or rebuild will ruin your NVidia drivers, because the package manager does not know about these semi-manually installed files.

It wouldn't be hard to fix by incorporating the NVidia software into a managed software package for automatic installation, but NVidia clearly wants people to click on the end-user license agreement when they install the drivers. This makes automatic deployment of such drivers a real problem for the Linux world. Nvidia has chosen not to cooperate with this much needed feature of Linux operating systems, and the resulting instability is quite predictable.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, WINE is not emulation.

Second, I see this opinion a lot, but I see no real evidence for it. The "gamer" market is well represented on sites like this, but out in the real world we make up a fairly small percentage of PC users. I don't think a lack of games for Linux is the problem.

Besides, I'd say Linux has better support for games than Mac (if you count WINE and Cedega).

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Mattsson]

Getting accelerated 3D, 2D and Video-playback working at the same time is really tricky in Linux, you really have to research in depth what cards will work and which distributions they work well with.

You can't develop closed source, for profit games in that environment. You have close to zero potential customers.

If most modern cards worked 100% out of the box, and there where a stable game-API or game-HAL, then it would make sense to develop for it.
The API or HAL must not only do 3D, but the 2D part, sound, joystick support, etc, together with a standardized way of installation and something that would make it possible to distribute binary games that ran on almost all distributions.

Then this system can be ported to OSX, Windows, PS2/PS3/PSP, XB/XB360 and GC/Wii/DS, and we'll have plenty of games on Linux since if you develop for one platform, the work required to port it to the others is slim. =)

Conformity for the win! (At least when it comes to multi-platform development. ^_^ )

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Yvanhoe]

Gamers, the Linux community just doesn't care for them. Why do you think kernel developers want nvidia drivers to open ?
The OSS community cares for gamers but can't care too much for commercial games. Look around a bit, you'll find many OSS games. Strategy, FPS, action. There are also more and more commercial games that come with a linux version.

The niche of the "latest cutting-edge FPS with extra glitter and shaders 15.6 with 2X PhysX simulation" is today on windows, that's right. That's in part because graphical drivers sucks on linux. Open them, let them improve, and see what happens when OSS drivers become more robust than windows drivers.
I long for that day. All gamers are not coders but a lot of them are power users who configure their OS, mod their PCs. Linux is just made for their mindset.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Anonymous Coward]

And NVidia i a real burden this way. Their driver installers for Linux move aside your existing your OpenGL libraries, without notifying the package manager. This means that your next software update or rebuild will ruin your NVidia drivers, because the package manager does not know about these semi-manually installed files.

Huh? On Ubuntu all this 'just works'. I applied a Kernel upgrade a few weeks ago on Gutsy and the Nvidia drivers *were* dealt with totally invisibly by the package manager. Maybe other distros don't do this but it's obviously possible.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Portage includes nVidia drivers which are installed "automatically" when requested. It even provides a command line interface to switch between the binary nvidia drivers and the xorg-x11 default ones.

Can't speak for other distros, but installing the drivers was never a problem.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[makomk]

Funnily enough, the whole "Games for Windows" thing started at around the time Wine reached a level of maturity where running big-name games under Linux became possible.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[MLS100]

That's why Linux has seen widespread adoption on the business desktop where nobody cares about games DOT DOT DOT

Also, recent polls have shown that the majority of the Linux home users are people who don't like to play games or don't have the time, like the elderly and businessmen.

Yes, I think you're really on to something there.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[houghi]

On openSUSE it works. One click install and all.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[chthon]

In Debian this is a package that is managed by apt.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Hal_Porter]

Also, just to be pedantic: WINE is not an emulator. It's a reimplementation. Meaning, it doesn't emulate Windows, it is effectively a Windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator#Emulators_in_computer_science

Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program or electronic device to imitate another program or device. Many printers, for example, are designed to emulate Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers because so much software is written for HP printers. By emulating an HP printer, a printer can work with any software written for a real HP printer. Emulation "tricks" the running software into believing that a device is really some other device.

Sure sounds like Wine's Win32 reimplementation to me. It tricks the games into thinking they are running on Windows.

If you look at faq

http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#slow

Some people mean by that that Wine must emulate each processor instruction of the Windows application. This is plain wrong. As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor.

But as to the "it must emulate x86 instructions to run a Win32 application on x86 Linux" theory as someone once put it, "only an idiot would think that".

Mind you there is a flaw to Wine. Consider a DirectX game running on Windows. DirectX is thin veneer over the driver which is probably a thin veneer over the hardware. NVidia and ATI know that the biggest market for fast graphics cards in PCs is DirectX games on Windows. It makes sense to optimize their hardware for this - ideally the hardware should implement DirectX functions more or less directly. Abstraction layers cost time, and they want to get the best 3dMark200x score, not be 3D API independent.

Now run the same game on Wine. Wine needs to map DirectX to OpenGL. And at best call into the NVidia or ATI OpenGL accelerated binary driver. But if the hardware is basically implementing DirectX directly, the driver needs to map OpenGL back into DirectX before it can pass stuff to it. Note the worst case, where the users use the open source driver is worse than this, because that doesn't know enough about the hardware to accelerate things optimally.

ATI are planning to drop support for accelerated OpenGL on Windows as of Vista. Which makes you wonder how well future ATI hardware will support OpenGL

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=46&TopicId=11123

I read that NVidia don't support accelerated OpenGL on Linux. So if you have a game running on Wine 3D won't be accelerated at all.

And Microsoft will obviously do everything it can to kill accelerated OpenGL partly because it makes things like Wine pointless.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Hal_Porter]

Actually Vista is a Wine killer. I read that originally it would only support DirectX natively and OpenGL would be implemented over DirectX. Which would mean that hardware companies could only write a DirectX driver and the hardware would become even more DirectX oriented.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[rikkards]

Unfortunately Ubuntu mostly works. I updated to Heron from Gibbon and all of a sudden my Wireless (bc43) card decided not to connect to the AP.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[daffmeister]

In what way doesn't the linux community care for gamers? What features of the kernel or graphics systems do you believe are missing?

The problem is with the game developers, not the linux community.

And that's a simple problem of market share. As long as Windows is by far the dominant OS game developers will focus their efforts on that.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Not a single t

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Sauerbraten for FPS and MAME for classics, and some flightgear are fun enough for me. If I want to have more fun, I switch the lappy off :D

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[dankasfuk]

Ouch! My grammar hurts.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Hatta]

What do you expect the "linux community" to do? The infrastructure is there. We have OpenGL, directx through wine, OpenAL, SDL, etc. Anyone who wants to write or port a game to linux has the tools needed to do so.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[mrchaotica]

ATI are planning to drop support for accelerated OpenGL on Windows as of Vista. Which makes you wonder how well future ATI hardware will support OpenGL

If ATI is planning on dropping support for OpenGL, then it must be planning on dropping support for Macs and non-Xbox game consoles, too.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Gazzonyx]

Funny, you can get past the license using a command line switch. If you run NVIDIA-BlahBlahBlah.run --help, you find the following command line option:

[...]
The following arguments will be passed on to the ./nvidia-installer utility:

-a, --accept-license Bypass the display and prompting for acceptance of the NVIDIA Software License Agreement. By passing this option to nvidia-installer, you indicate that you have read and accept the License Agreement contained in the file 'LICENSE' (in the top level directory of the driver package).
[...]

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Tubal-Cain]

And code for WINE.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Blakey Rat]

there true enemy that needs to be defeated before Linux even has a chance at becoming mainstream:

Games for Windows

The fug-tards at Microsoft pay off every last PC game maker to put their dirty label on everything even the damn game reviews have that garbage label on it for god sakes.

Don't hold back; tell us how you really feel!

More seriously, though, the Games for Windows program is a natural response to the general crappiness of Windows games of the last few years. There have been tons of titles that:
1) Crash constantly
2) Don't support common configurations, like Internet Connection Sharing or widescreen monitors
3) Don't allow users to alt-tab to different applications, or run the game in windowed mode
4) Manage to sometimes not crash, but are otherwise extremely buggy to be almost unplayable
5) Require Admin permissions to run even though they're video games which, almost by definition, never need to perform any administrative tasks
6) Take months and months and months and years to finally port, or patch, their products to work in Vista. (As of a month ago, Punkbuster *still* didn't work correctly in Vista! Pathetic!!)
etc.

Microsoft can control what's released on their game consoles, as they retain the final "yay or nay" before the games get published. That means Microsoft actually tests the games to make sure they work correctly, shock and horror.

They currently have absolutely no control over what's released for PC, which I'm sure the Slashdot community sees as a good thing, but in reality results in a lot of really, really crappy products.

After a couple weeks of trying (and failing) to look past Battlefield 2142's numerous, numerous crashes and bugs, I finally threw my hands up, said "fuck it," and vowed that I'm only going to buy Games for Windows games from now on. You know why? Games for Windows games are *tested* and they *fucking work!* It's obvious that DICE didn't give half-a-shit about the quality of their product, so screw them.

(Yes, yes, I know, tell us how I really feel. Hah.)

The only decent non-Games for Windows titles out right now is World of Warcraft, which would fail that certification anyway. (It stores user-configurable UI Add-Ins in the Program Files folder, thus requiring admin access when it shouldn't.) Everything else it's good at though.

P.S. I hear the latest patch for BF:2142 added widescreen support-- wow, welcome to 2001, DICE!

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[joeytsai]

There is only one thing holding back Linux from being used more wide-spread.

Gamers, the Linux community just doesn't care for them.

LOL. Only on Slashdot would such a myopic and out-of-touch perspective get a +5, Insightful. Gamers are certainly a powerful marketforce, but to say that is why Linux isn't adopted (presumably on the desktop, because Linux is incredibly wide-spread in the enterprise / embedded markets) is plain wrong.

If gamers were such a powerful market force, then everyone would be running a water-cooled box with a transparent side with neon lights and such. How many of your friends have machines like that? In fact, the big shift from the standard beige boxes came when Apple made its comeback with it's bright, colorful, lickable machines did PC vendors start changing. Because the real desktop consumers - NOT gamers - wanted it.

Additionally, the console market is continually eroding PC gaming. Of course there are still plenty of PC gamers but there fewer and fewer PC exclusives. MMOs are a big stronghold, but I think once they figure out the billing with xbox live or Playstation Network that will begin to erode as well. And of course there's the constant whining by the FPS people who can't stand to use console controllers. Hardcore PC gamers aside, PC is really losing to the casual and brand-new gamers who don't want to deal with 3D cards, drivers, DirectX updates, etc. On top of that, that's exactly the market consoles are targeting with simpler games on XBLA, Playstation Store, and every game on the Wii.

Do you really think that if Linux could run 100% of all PC games with performance indistinguishable from Windows, would that even double the already-small Linux desktop adoption? I encounter many people and many windows computers every day, and I doubt it would hardly make a dent. Those who want to run Linux are already dual-booting to play their games. I assume that's what you're doing... if not, then would you really change your whole environment if your games ran on Linux?

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Antique Geekmeister]

You're using YaST, right? Unless it's changed from SuSE, that one click is dead wrong. It ignores the RPM management, and installs an out-of-date NVidia tarball from NVidia's website, with no way in the YaST system to select a newer version of the NVidia drivers, in order to force you to go though the manual agreement to the EULA. As soon as the Xorg package that includes the OpenGL libraries is installed, it overwrites the NVidia included OpenGL libraries because the RPM system knows nothing about those libraries, because they're only one component of a much larger package which NVidia's installers do _not_ replace.

I ran into this with an Italian professional colleague who likes SuSE last year. It was quite nasty to keep his system alive, partly because YaST is so unable to see or keep the modifications made directly in configurations, modifications that it has no way itself to create. The results are deadly.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[Antique Geekmeister]

Yes, you can. But rewriting an installer to avoid having to manually accept the EULA is itself a violation of the EULA: including it in a distribution is _definitely_ a violation of the EULA.

There are published RPM's, such as those at livna.org, for RPM system users. And from an earlier comment, I'm looking at the new alternative repository for OpenSuSE at http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA. The craziness and foolishness needed to integrate it are related to the inability to include its OpenGL libraries in the basic OS installation, and the RPM simply runs the Nvidia installer automatically. Unless they've gotten very clever, upgrades of the Nvidia or RPM provided OpenGL libraries will completely ruin the setup and disable X windows.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[AnyoneEB]

Also running in an emulated environment just doesn't cut it - it could be possible but WINE just can't do it for some games.

WINE support for games seems pretty good overall. If developers cared about Linux support they could probably compile against libwine and fix whatever problems occured, but that involves a lot of extra effort to test and support it.

Re:open source drivers and gaming 4 linux

[dotancohen]

And code for WINE.

Those of us who cannot write code, can at least write letters to the game devs. Here are their addresses:

ArenaNet (Guild wars): http://www.arena.net/contact.php

Ironclad Games (Sins of a Solar Empire) http://www.ironcladgames.com/contact.html

Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform-us.xml?gameId=0

Firzxis (Civilization IV) http://www.firaxis.com/support/

Electronic Arts (lots of games) http://www.info.ea.com/company/company_prlist.php

Valve (Steam: Counterstrike, other games) http://www.valvesoftware.com/contact.html

Ask for either native Linux port or Wine-compatible Windows binaries.

Where's Linus?

[Ewasx]

Did anyone else notice that Linus himself is not on that list? Does this mean that he doesn't mind closed source modules?

Re:Where's Linus?

[Fri13]

I dont know about Linus but many coder, do not care, they just want working thing for customers, and they talk behalf of the customers that customers do not care about GPL or freedom.

I think that is in long run very stupid attitude, it is like shooting to a own leg.

Re:Where's Linus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, even RMS has said that closed-source drivers are OK in some circumstances. Which is highly ironic since his whole tirade against the industry began when he couldn't get printer driver source. But I digress.

Linux's chief quality is picking winning battles. Hence his ommision from that list.

Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[radoni]

Scenario: Mom asks you to install Ubuntu on her Dell computer setup.

Problems:

1) Open Source libata driver for the SATA optical drive causes frequent timeouts and hangs. Looks like a problem with the Ubuntu kernel. Tell Mom it's just like Windows XP, there are problems which will be updated and fixed "eventually".

2) Dell printer not supported by CUPS and open source drivers. There is no support from Dell, but a 20 minute Google search effort turns up the model is a re-branded Lexmark. The Ubuntu community forums detail a process to install proprietary Lexmark drivers for Debian GNU/Linux. Tell mom it's just like Windows XP, some printers need a certain version of driver for the device.

3) Displayed video is incorrect on Dell LCD display. Search Google for about a solid hour to find an answer. Looks like an Ubuntu problem with an open source driver. Tell Mom that there's nothing wrong with her computer, even though the screen is completely black for the whole boot process.

My own conclusion:

Ubuntu is a hit-or-miss installation for Dell hardware owners. Mostly miss. The open source or closed source nature of a driver does not factor into user acceptance. The user is uncomfortable when their hardware is "broken" due to a missing or incompatible driver.

Mom's conclusion:

The Ubuntu Hardy "bird" logo is "pretty".

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[Anonymous Coward]

Mom should have stuck with a preinstalled XP. Possibly tried Ubuntu through a VM.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[Anonymous Coward]

MS does or at least did give virtual PC 2007 away. I did get linux (mandrake) running on it, on vista ultimate. It was a little bit flaky, but I didn't bust my ass poking it with sticks either. so that is a legitimate option. although, one would generally assume the linux transition is precipitated by the unsuitability of some aspect of windows. When I set people up with linux, its nearly always because they want to troll for porn popup and malware free (lets be honest, i'm anon).

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[SanityInAnarchy]

Question: Why didn't Mom buy her Dell with Ubuntu instead? That way, at least there'd be someone to call when you have these issues.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[MLS100]

It must be nice being able to predict the future.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[Jesus_666]

You don't need to. Just throw away her perfectly working old computer and buy her a new one. As an heir to a vast fortune I know how to deal with money; it's hard to understand why anyone would think twice about paying a modest 1000 Dollars for the convenience of having a different Linux pre-installed. I mean, it's not like that's even spare change.

- P.H.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[jellomizer]

Well MS Bought Virtual PC a few years ago, they didn't do much to it yet luckally. However there is VMWare and Parallels too which does the same thing and is a bit better with LInux.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[earthforce_1]

Yet another reason not to buy Lexmark - If you remember, they tried to use the DMCA to squelch the after market toner industry.

(I have had good luck with HP)

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[OhPlz]

I used to favor HP, until Vista came along and they didn't bother releasing a driver for any of their older (but still fairly recent) models. Seems that they preferred to have everyone buy a new printer. Which I did, and none were HPs.

They may have more support for Linux than other manufacturers, but they're no friend of the consumer. Especially considering that debacle with the ink refills a while back.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't Mom buy her Dell with Ubuntu instead?

You mean, "Just like people do with Windows?" I'm pretty sick of Linux install nightmares from people who've clearly never had to install Windows.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[navyjeff]

I used to favor HP, until Vista came along and they didn't bother releasing a driver for any of their older (but still fairly recent) models. Seems that they preferred to have everyone buy a new printer. Which I did, and none were HPs.

They may have more support for Linux than other manufacturers, but they're no friend of the consumer. Especially considering that debacle with the ink refills a while back.

My father just got a new computer with Vista on it. He kept his old HP DJ 832C. It prints fine.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[Anonymous Coward]

Question: Why didn't Mom buy her Dell with Ubuntu instead? That way, at least there'd be someone to call when you have these issues.

Because, when she bought her computer, she still hadn't heard of Linux??

Ummm . . . duh??

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[ckaminski]

I used a relatively older OfficeJet 3055 with Vista before I upgraded back to XP...

I didn't get network printing configured (wrong software package) but usb printing was just fine.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[OhPlz]

I don't recall the model numbers anymore, but there several inkjet models that didn't get drivers. Maybe they were older than I thought, I did have a difficult time finding ink for some of them the last time. It's frustrating to "need" to replace hardware that functions just fine.

The whole printer industry is a scam, IMO. There's no reason why Staples should have a gigantic wall full of incompatible cartridges.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[Leynos]

I can't say I've had any nightmares installing Windows at work. On maybe around twenty PCs so far. Can't say I had any nightmares installing Ubuntu either, mind you.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[SanityInAnarchy]

Because, when she bought her computer, she still hadn't heard of Linux?? Fair enough, but I still refuse to see it as a point against Linux.

After all, when she bought her computer, she might not have heard of Apple. Should she then expect OS X to work on her Dell?

More extreme example: When she bought her Xbox, she might not have heard of Windows. Should she then expect windows to work on it? (Keep in mind that you can actually get Windows to run on the original Xbox -- though there's a layer of Linux in between.)

The fact that Linux works on computers that weren't designed for it is actually pretty impressive -- not something to assume as an expectation, and blame Linux for when it doesn't work.

Re:Dell printers (re-branded Lexmark hardware)

[SanityInAnarchy]

I've had plenty. If I had to install it on a dozen identical PCs, I'm sure that after the first nightmare, the rest would seem easy...

What you have to do is put them on a fair playing field. I have a laptop that's designed for Vista, and XP was at least as difficult to get working as Ubuntu.

Open Technical Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Shipping drivers for only windows is bad, but shipping drivers for only windows and linux is (magically!!) good???

Fight for open specifications. That will enable any competent driver-writer to write drivers and all OSs can compete on fair grounds. By technical documentation, I don't mean "the guide to programming the Emc2x86" kind of stuff. There should be "The exhaustive reference to programming the Emc2x86" kind of stuff. There should the following guarantees associated with the documentation, only then the hardware can be called as "openly documented hardware":

1. For a sufficiently competent programmer, the documentation supplied is enough to achieve 100% feature parity with the proprietary drivers.

2. The documentation supplied must contain as a subset, all interfacial knowledge known to the writers of the proprietary drivers.

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

> 1. For a sufficiently competent programmer, the documentation supplied is enough to achieve 100% feature parity with the proprietary drivers.

No it doesn't. Your assuming time doesn't matter and that the hardware follows the documentation.

Time does matter because if a person releases a product to market without a pre-existing Linux driver then Linux people can't use it until developers purchase it and begin hacking on it.

Hardware has bugs, like software. Also hardware deviates from specifications. For example with both ATI and Intel video hardware they are subject to variations that individual motherboard and video card manufacturers create.

Without assistance from the people who actually worked on developing the hardware then your going to end up doing a lot of trial and error to figure out what is wrong.

> 2. The documentation supplied must contain as a subset, all interfacial knowledge known to the writers of the proprietary drivers.

Your assuming that such documentation exists or that it's even possible for that manufacturer to create, and that they can afford to create such documentation. Not everybody has all the time and money in the world to create extensive documentation for their products.

Not everybody has the budget and experience that Intel and AMD have...

The reality of the situation that is unless you have the attention of OEMs and have people that are willing to work on the inside with the manufacturers to work on documentation and drivers then isn't going to get the same level of attention that even Linux gets.

Because of the realities surrounding developing hardware having working, open source, Linux drivers is the best documentation that your going to get, and in fact are often superior.

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[mpe]

1. For a sufficiently competent programmer, the documentation supplied is enough to achieve 100% feature parity with the proprietary drivers.

In practice they may not want to do this. Instead they may want a feature set which works well with X.org. Which could easily wind up doing some things the proprietary driver dosn't and not do some things it does.

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the Anonymous Coward who wrote the parent post of the parent of this post.

> Time does matter because if a person releases a product to market without a pre-existing Linux driver then Linux people can't use it until developers purchase it and begin hacking on it.

You're right. I agree with that. That's why I'm not asking companies to stop providing Linux drivers. I'm just asking for infinite choice. They can give away programming documentation alongside pre-existing drivers for popular OSs.

If releasing without pre-existing Linux drivers is a sin, then so is releasing without pre-existing BSD drivers... and so is releasing without "NanoSoft Chairs XP" drivers.

My point is that there are an infinity of operating systems and the only way you can support "infinite number" of OSs is by releasing documentation. We don't need info about the design of the hardware. We only need the interfacial specifications. (For example, the x86 instruction set)

> Hardware has bugs, like software.
> Without assistance from the people who actually worked on developing the hardware then your going to end up doing a lot of trial and error to figure out what is wrong.

Hard fact, but very true. The solution is to provide an errata document too but not through a very visible site. ;)

> Also hardware deviates from specifications. For example with both ATI and Intel video hardware they are subject to variations that individual motherboard and video card manufacturers create.

In this case, those individual manufacturers need to provide the specs. It's THEIR duty to document how to program THEIR hardware.

> Your assuming that such documentation exists or that it's even possible for that manufacturer to create, and that they can afford to create such documentation. Not everybody has all the time and money in the world to create extensive documentation for their products.

Without such documentation, how else does the "nVidia Windows driver" writer know about "nVidia xxx4286"? You are viewing programming documentation as an optional addon. I think every customer of a hardware device has the right to know, irrespective of their OS, how to use the hardware.

The best solution, atleast for the companies that can afford it, is:

1. Provide drivers for popular OSs.
2. Provide documentation to enable users to other OSs.

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[hhw]

No it doesn't. Your assuming time doesn't matter and that the hardware follows the documentation.

Developers are willing to contribute their time. This is the whole point of open source. If the hardware doesn't follow the documentation, then the documentation should be better.

Time does matter because if a person releases a product to market without a pre-existing Linux driver then Linux people can't use it until developers purchase it and begin hacking on it.

That's rather short sighted. Sure, the driver comes out a few months earlier, but when the company stops supporting that product, who's to maintain the code when nobody has a clue what it does? Without documentation, the drivers are meaningless. Perpetuity is a more than worthwhile trade-off for a few months.

Without assistance from the people who actually worked on developing the hardware then your going to end up doing a lot of trial and error to figure out what is wrong.

And there is somehow less trial and error when having to reverse engineer a driver?

Your assuming that such documentation exists or that it's even possible for that manufacturer to create, and that they can afford to create such documentation. Not everybody has all the time and money in the world to create extensive documentation for their products.

Are you joking? Documentation is essential for any engineering process, be it hardware or software. If they don't have such documentation, there is a serious flaw in their internal processes. If such a company really didn't have any such documentation, they would be doing themselves a huge favour by writing some, as their product quality would see substantial improvement.

Not everybody has the budget and experience that Intel and AMD have...

So this is why small Taiwanese manufacturers like Areca, who are relatively new in the market, are doing a much better job with documentation and open source drivers than old giants like Adaptec or LSI?

The reality of the situation that is unless you have the attention of OEMs and have people that are willing to work on the inside with the manufacturers to work on documentation and drivers then isn't going to get the same level of attention that even Linux gets.

That's exactly what people are trying to accomplish here.

Because of the realities surrounding developing hardware having working, open source, Linux drivers is the best documentation that your going to get, and in fact are often superior.

Absolute nonsense. The only reason why the drivers would be the best documentation we can get, is because people like you are willing to accept it.

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[BenoitRen]

Your assuming

Your assuming

your going

YOU'RE (YOU ARE)

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[rootooftheworld]

you must be new here. i hate grammar nazis!

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[BenoitRen]

Right, I'm so new that my Slashdot user ID is lower than yours.

Re:Open Technical Documentation

[rootooftheworld]

Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[dotancohen]

But instead of pushing water uphill with those software companies, why don't you look for software that does equivalent things on Linux (open source, or proprietary)? There is currently no Solidworks-compatible program (open- or closed- source) available. The problem is not that I need to work alone, the problem is that I need to interoperate with other engineers.

Re:Wrong approach

[mrsteveman1]

If that was a troll it wasn't even a good one.

The Linux kernel (as in, what comes with the source) is bloated because a lot of the code that runs in kernelspace on a linux machine COMES with the kernel, this is not the case on other OS, such as OS X and its XNU kernel. If you grab the XNU source from Apple it contains probably less than 50% of what ends up actually running in the kernel space.

This isn't a bad thing, it just means a lot of the code running in kernel space is open source and is distributed together.

As for stability, Linux is one of the most stable systems I've used, especially for web services.

Breakng news

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news Linus Torvalds has announced that he's working on a cutting-edge AI project. It was under wraps, but a really interesting post on a well-known tech community site, persuaded him of the need to release details earlier than planned.

Torvalds described the AI as being part of an 'Free Software enforcement bot', code named 'The Stallmanator'. Features include:

• parachuting into enemy headquarters;
• target, seek, interrogate, and destroy hostile egg-headed CEO's;
• 'IntelliChairSense' - a 360 degree flying-chair-threat detector;
• special persuasion tactics for coercing proprietary software loving devs, lawyers, CEO/CIO's to see the light of Free software;
• a selection of quotes, which are planned for the MiniStallmanator doll, that the kids will just love (said with a realistic Schwartzenegger accent):

  'I need your patents, your code and your motorcycle.'

  'Free your hardware specifications and drivers, if you want to live.'

  'I'll be busy (eating Cheetos)'

  'The GNUNet funding bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from Debian package management. GNUNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.'

  'Hurd up, homies.'

With DARPA backing this project, I don't think the likes of nVidia or Lexmark will hold out for long. They're likely to get 'Stallmanated'.

Value of NVidias drivers, from another post.

[thesupraman]

I posted this over at RWT a month or so ago..

>Here is really the main point, which you're brushing
>aside -- this makes the hardware worth more, because
>you're making it potentially more usable for end users.
>Maybe not all end-users, but certainly some. I don't
>understand why you say it's a "very different kettle of
>fish" ? Different than releasing the specs? If anything
>it means fixes will happen faster.

I am not brushing anything aside, I am saying that a lot of people for a long time have ranted about opensource drivers for advanced video cards - and as yet I have seen no-one discuss it at a level that actually addresses what would be involved.

My 'very different kettle of fish' above is the vendors actually releasing full-stack sourcecode, versus just hardware specs.

My position on the hardware specs (and I am not claiming proof for this, it is only my position) is that it is next to useless for high-performance users. We may well see competent 2d opensource drivers, and 3d ones that can limp along - however graphics hardware has moved a LONG way from there.

I would *love* to see a fully opensource stack with high performance for opengl, however is it practical?

In your reply (sorry, I clipped it back a bit for brevity) you mentioned harddrive makers doing sector remapping - that is probably a whole few pages of code in their controllers. For a full modern opengl stack we are probably talking in the millions of lines region - we are talking of something with a scope not unlike the linux kernel itself, or at least a good proportion of it.
This is NOT similar to any other type of driver that I can think of - it is an almost unique case.

Just looking at opengl, the cards driver needs to be able to handle multiple simultaneous execution of overlapped and scheduled code, all in realtime, on in the region of 100-300 semi-linked vector cpus, all without cross-interference, while also maintain multiple streams of data at GB rates in and out of the card, and all while following a VERY explicit and highly complex set of rules governing the results.

Put another way, these devices are bleeding edge modern realtime computers, on a card - and their 'drivers' are really realtime OSs, although highly specialised.

Intel, in its infinite wisdom, as about to try and take that to the next level - making such cards x86ish, with an eye I suspect to reducing the complexity of software entry, after having failed miserably to write working drivers for their existing (965, g35, g45 so far) hardware.

All I say is lets cut these guys some slack - the capability of the hardware/software combination of a 9600gt, for around $150, is simply astounding. Should they expect 'help' from kernel developers, etc? of course not. Should they be punished? I say no.

Anyhow, I know that is bordering on preaching, and of course very opinionated - however I do like to see things treated with an even hand, and I have not always seen that happen with the issue of opensource 3d graphics drivers.

Re:Value of NVidias drivers, from another post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst you say that your
"position on the hardware specs (and I am not claiming proof for this, it is only my position) is that it is next to useless for high-performance users. We may well see competent 2d opensource drivers, and 3d ones that can limp along - however graphics hardware has moved a LONG way from there."
you should be aware that some really competent driver writers have said that open-sourcing the code that somebody else wrote is totally useless.

The OpenBSD guys have reverse engineered lots of hardware that other projects had drivers for (usually with blobs)and would never put in that effort if reading somebody else's code was sufficient.

In fact, every time they request details from a manufacturer, it is necessary to repeat until it gets through some bonehead's skull, that they would rather NOT see someone else's driver source.

There is a lot of support for the view that hiding the specs AND the source to existing drivers is, in part, to hide the fact that there are bugs in the hardware that need work-arounds.

Re:Value of NVidias drivers, from another post.

[Kjella]

My position on the hardware specs (and I am not claiming proof for this, it is only my position) is that it is next to useless for high-performance users. We may well see competent 2d opensource drivers, and 3d ones that can limp along - however graphics hardware has moved a LONG way from there. Well, at least now we have the chance to find out. Most of the 3D documentation is out (last was R600 ISA on the 11th) and I know what you're saying. Still, the open-source community has pulled off rather amazing tasks before and with some commercial support from vendors maybe some of those "pro" coders will participate too. I mean, I know it's a frigging huge task, but I don't for one second believe it's written by anything other than mortal men and could be written again. There's always closed source drivers to hold us over until if or when the open source drivers materialize. Saying "you can't have the specs because you wouldn't be able to do anything with them" would be rather offensive, if you ask me. Release them, and let reality be the judge of that.

Re:Value of NVidias drivers, from another post.

[Ant P.]

For a full modern opengl stack we are probably talking in the millions of lines region - we are talking of something with a scope not unlike the linux kernel itself, or at least a good proportion of it.
This is NOT similar to any other type of driver that I can think of - it is an almost unique case. Gee, if only there was some way to interpret OpenGL commands from a 3D app, then optimise them into bytecode and run the result on hardware, in real time...

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[BiggerBadderBen]

Don't use Intuit as an example. While TurboTax for Mac is OK, Quicken is just shit.

The carrot & stick already exist.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

This petition is just a gentle reminder that the carrot (utilizing OSS community development process) & stick (customers switching vendors) already exist. (from TLA):

Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors. Therefore, in order to take full advantage of the cost savings and shared support benefits open source has to offer, we urge vendors to adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source kernel code.

Re:License?

[debatem1]

Trolling or serious? I can't even tell anymore. And isn't most artistic license code dual licensed under GPL?

Just incase any hardware people are listening

[pembo13]

Regardless if I am buying for myself or a client, or for Windows or GNU/Linux, explicit Linux support (by way of drivers) is always a +1 for me.

games have trouble making money on windows already

[Anonymous Coward]

Current AAA video games are purely commercial and money oriented. They have to be considering they run in the tens of millions and that's WITH the poor wages and hours of video game programmers, artists, testers, etc. Most of those games currently lose money in Windows. High levels of piracy don't help either. (granted, money losing studios exaggerate piracy's impact)

In short, the overburdened games companies don't need the extra burden of making a Linux version.

Re:Wrong approach

[Zero__Kelvin]

When a moron like The_Abortionist posts something so obviously absurd, I find it helps to look at the users comment history. One look makes it clear that s/he is intentionally trying to get the worst ever history. -1 and 0 for every post. Sometimes I ask people if they go to a special class to sound like a moron, or if it just comes naturally. Now I know who runs the special classes :-)

about 2 years behind OpenBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Release 3.9 had the "blob" theme.

Crikey! They're catching up!

Re:License?

[BrainInAJar]

dual license is fine too, but adding a driver that only works in Linux by virtue of legalities is just as bad as keeping it closed source

Re:OK! Look you linux geeks.

[Anonymous Coward]

no money = no support.

Linux already supports more hardware than anything else ever has. Please go away.

Work first, open source second

[Anonymous Coward]

So these are the people who requested that Intel replace the functional restricted rights ipw3945 wifi driver with the broken iwl3945 driver (Buguntu #227279). This is a regression. It used to work now it doesn't and unless Intel make their proprietary algorithms available it is not going to work in the future. Current advice for those suffering from the horribly hopeless 8.04 release; download the Microsoft driver and wrap with ndis.

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[somersault]

He is looking for software that does equivalent things on Linux, which is why he is writing to those companies. Professional quality 3D CAD applications don't (currently) just appear for free, and they need to interoperate like cohen says. You can get some good calculation software for Linux, but I haven't seen any decent 3D CAD software yet :( Apparently the Autodesk codebase in particular is heavily Windows specific these days. Perhaps Mono will help with that but I'd rather have native apps than try to simulate Windows.

This is why I had to re-install XP on my rig

[LordAlced]

Ubuntu does not have drivers for my Linksys Wireless PC card and my Intel graphics card. I was so excited (because it was the equivalent of spitting on Microsoft's face) when I got the Ubuntu CD from the mail (I had it shipped) but was disappointed when I would be getting the standard 800 by 600 resolution that wouldn't allow me to see the bottom of huge dialog boxes and wired technology.

I keep on forgetting that my Dell Inspiron 2600 is "designed for Windows XP." It was like being in a relationship that would never work because she's(Ubuntu) too good for you.

This is bullshit

[jopet]

While I like the idea of open source and develop nearly exclusively open-source myself, i find it counterproductive to insist on open-source drivers. This is not a religious war, or should not be. This should be about pragmatically doing everything to create a useful alternative to other OS. This should be about making Linux successful.

It simply will never happen that we get open-source drivers for all the hardware Windows users are enjoying. Make it as easy as possible to get *any* form of driver, make it so that binary drivers cannot kill the system and it will still be difficult to get enough drivers to not make users shy away from Linux.

Then, when we have 50% market share you can start putting pressure on hardware vendors, not now.

Re:This is bullshit

[JohnFluxx]

Sounds awful - then you get a situation where you have binary drivers which mostly can't be shipped with the distribution, can't be updated, only work with a certain kernel version on a certain distro...

Sounds terrible

Re:This is bullshit

[jopet]

Look I am not advocation binary drivers. I just feel that it is useless to *demand* them from the companies involved if we do not even get decent binary ones. Of course it would be ideal if all hardware vendors would publish detailed technical specification of their devices, would proviced opensource drivers etc.
But these companies have motivations why they do not do that. So in order for the end Linux user to suffer least, do not insist on opensource drivers but make it as easy as possible to provide whatever they feel safe with, without at the same time putting the system at hazard technically.

Yes, this might lead to problems with kernel versions or distributions, but 1) maybe the kernel developers could concentrate on providing an infrastructure that minimizes those problems for the providers of binary drivers and 2) some hardware vendors will rather deal with this than provide opensource drivers.

This is in reality not a simple choice between terrible and ideal but rather between terrible and slightly less terrible.

Re:This is bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

It simply will never happen that we get open-source drivers for all the hardware Windows users are enjoying. Make it as easy as possible to get *any* form of driver, make it so that binary drivers cannot kill the system and it will still be difficult to get enough drivers to not make users shy away from Linux.

If the driver cannot kill the system, it cannot talk directly to the hardware - anything talking directly to the hardware can kill the system (even a userspace process like X). It would have to talk through some kind of interface, that know the hardware, knows what operations are safe, and what operations kill the system. Something with deep knowledge of the hardware.

We normally call that interface a "driver".

Re:This is bullshit

[dave420]

I agree with you entirely. First things first. Get binary drivers for Linux that just work, and once enough people start using it, then push the manufacturers for actual open drivers. Of course, open drivers are not always possible, considering that drivers can (and frequently do, especially for video cards) contain licensed code.

We need to improve what we have

[wrook]

One thing that I've started realizing lately is that we need to improve the open source drivers that we already have. This may give companies more incentive to open their own drivers.

For example, we are all happy about the free software drivers that Intel provides for the i950, etc graphics chipsets. However, there are still some significant 3D performance issues with this driver. I don't blame the team working on it because they have other important priorities. However, it is a fact that games run many times faster on Windows with this chipset than in X (and I'm not just talking about Wine games). Games like Vegastrike just don't run acceptably in X on a i945GM box -- and it should be able to handle this game easily.

If we could pick a few drivers that need help and make them indisputably good, this might provide incentive for companies to support our efforts.

I would be happy to start working on the the Intel graphics driver with an aim to improving its 3D performance. However, even though I have 20 years of application development, I'm a newbie at driver development. I don't know where to start. If anyone can point me in the right direction.... Even if it takes me a really long time to make any improvement, I'll at least be another pair of eyes.

Re:We need to improve what we have

[makomk]

The thing is, the Linux drivers for Intel hardware are developed by Intel, and they're just not very good at it. For example, there's a demonstration TTM-based driver for the i915 that gets better performance than any of the Intel drivers for it, even after they wrote their own memory management code specifically for Intel hardware. (Of course, a lot of the TTM-based stuff is probably broken right now due to changes Intel made when getting their memory management code merged.)

Re:We need to improve what we have

[DraconPern]

So you are saying that even with Intel's open sourced i915 driver, the performance still suck, despite there are kernel developers who have too much time on their hands (because they want to write your driver for free!). If I was Nvidia, I wouldn't want to make my driver open sourced either. It called too many cooks in the kitchen. :)

Re:We need to improve what we have

[wrook]

Yes. 3D performance on Intel's open sourced i915 driver sucks (IMHO). I don't know if there are kernel developers who have free time. Many other aspects of the driver (and there are lots of them) are good. So I'm not complaining in general. Just specifically about 3D performance.

The open source driver was written and maintained by a company on contract with Intel. Intel pays them to do the work. I'm not aware of any unpaid developers on this project (at least long term ones). AFAICT their goals do not include good 3D performance. They are mostly interested in adding code for the latest hardware that's coming out and and making sure that all the more regular features work on all manufacturer's mother boards (things like TV out, monitor rotation, etc, etc).

Like I said, I don't blame them for poor 3D performance. If you look at the code, most of it is geared toward other priorities. They get paid to do what they're asked to do.

The issue is that there are *not enough* cooks in the kitchen. Lately, some progress has been made in improving 3D performance. But there's a long way to go IMHO. We need to get more programmers working on it and show that open source development is a viable model.

What can we say when one of the most vaunted open source drivers really is lacking in such an obvious area? What will convince other manufacturers that open sourcing their drivers will result in something that will show off their hardware in a good light?

I think the answer to this is to do what we do best which is to write code.

Re:We need to improve what we have

[makomk]

Actually, it looks like there's still fairly active development work on using Gallium with the i915. It's currently in the main gallium-0.1 branch. I've no idea how well it works now, but it's supposed to be the most promising approach.

Re:License?

[Lonewolf666]

For the BSD guys, that would indeed be better. But Linux is probably the bigger market. So if I was making that decision on behalf of the vendor, I'd release the driver under a dual license:
GPL and BSD (not sure ATM if you can stick BSD code into a GPL project without incurring additional obligations).

Such arrogance...

[JazzManDRP]

Hardware vendors like nVidia run a business. They run a business to make money. If nVidia didn't make financially-successful decisions, they wouldn't exist to be producing the graphics cards in the first place. That's all there is to it.

If there was money in Linux they'd be right there, open-source drivers and all, but there isn't. This is a fact that open-source developers never seem to understand. You can cheerfully dedicate half your life to creating this wonderful utopian software, but you can't force your ideals on someone else - especially on a company whose aims do not coincide with yours. Make it a financially beneficial proposition, and nVidia will spend the time and money on creating those drivers - but I doubt it's anything near that.

What responsibility do nVidia have towards the Linux desktop? The same as they have towards Windows: absolutely none. But they support Windows because 90% of desktops with their graphics cards installed run Windows.

And yes, Intel and ATI have managed to push out open source drivers - that's up to them, but I don't imagine they make profit from it. Yes, it's a real pain in the arse to work with binary drivers. Yes, if nVidia were to release open-source drivers the world would be a happier place. But to act like Linux users have some *right* to these drivers is childish and arrogant.

What Linux users have the right to do is buy a different graphics card.

Re:Such arrogance...

[JohnFluxx]

By publically telling NVidia to release open source drivers and telling users to not buy until they do, you are giving nvidia a financial incentive to do so.

By encouraging people to put pressure on NVidia, you are making it more profitable for them to do so, because they do not want the bad publicity and perhaps loss in sales.

Re:Such arrogance...

[chrb]

It might be arrogance to *force* nVidia to support Linux, or to insist that Linux users have the *right* to open source drivers. However, that isn't what the authors of this statement are doing - they aren't storming nVidia HQ in an armed revolution, but merely pointing out that binary drivers are a PITA, and asked companies nicely to consider releasing open source drivers in the future. And that's fine.

Re:Such arrogance...

[Anonymous Coward]

What Linux users have the right to do is buy a different graphics card.

Which is exactly what they're doing. Nvidia is no longer the video card of choice for linux boxen.

What was your point about making it profitable, again?

Re:Such arrogance...

[dave420]

Your points would make sense if the linux market was approaching the size of Windows. It's not. It's not even close. That "financial incentive" is tiny, either way.

Re:Such arrogance...

[delt0r]

The same as they have towards Windows: absolutely none. But they support Windows because 90% of desktops with their graphics cards installed run Windows. These drivers are binary blobs too. We are not just expecting that they support Linux like windows, but that they support Linux better than windows with the expectation of OS.

Personally I don't care all that much if it works. And it works really well. I just got a laptop because it had a nv card, because I knew the nv/nvidia driver would work. And it did work very well (unlike the wireless). If they want to keep there IP/trade secrets via binary blobs, they are free to do so.

Fact is that if it comes to OS or no Linux then they would probably go in the no Linux direction. That would be very bad for Linux in general.

Re:Such arrogance...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not forcing anybody to do anything. It's simply a position statement which you would know if you RTFA... oh, nevermind.

Re:Such arrogance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware vendors like nVidia run a business. They run a business to make money. If nVidia didn't make financially-successful decisions, they wouldn't exist to be producing the graphics cards in the first place. That's all there is to it. That's bullshit reasoning. For instance there are 'successful' factories that vent all their waste heat directly despite companies that will install sterling or other generators for free and maintain them, giving the company a cut of the profits. All they have to do is say 'ok' and they get x% off their energy bill.

Just because a company is 'successful' doesn't mean they are profitable OR that they make sound decisions. And then when you talk short vs long term it's even less clear who has their head on straight.

But I can tell you this. For upwards of a decade I have been buying nvidia graphics because it worked better with linux, but my next card will be ati. NVidia are pissing away good reputation with a small buy very influential customer base. They better have a pretty freaking good reason to do this if they expect to maintain their position in the market.

Re:Such arrogance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Nvidia sort of has a responsibility to the linux platform. But Generally I do agree with you. The bulk of Nvidia Linux development is driven by HP workstation machines. That's the reason why they ported SLI to linux. Originally they weren't going to bother but HP wanted it for workstations so Nvidia complied. If the community wants results they need to get companies on their side. Companies like HP, Compaq, Acer, Asus, Gigabyte and Dell.

Re:Such arrogance...

[JohnFluxx]

I think it's larger than you think.

I do actually work for a company that writes graphics drivers and makes computer chips. _Most_ of our customers (TI etc) actually demand GPL drivers and there is semi-serious talk to open source our entire software stack because of customer demand. Most customers actually prefer the GPL licensed driver than the proprietary licensed one, even though we offer the customer the code in both cases.

Do not underestimate the financial pressure for open source drivers.

Re:Such arrogance...

[dave420]

It might be larger than I think, but it clearly isn't as large as it needs to be to leverage support from the large players. Your anecdote isn't reflective of the entire industry.

Re:License?

[BrainInAJar]

Plenty of the Linux kernel is lifted from BSD so yes, you can add BSD code to GPL, the converse is not true

Perhaps a different question...

[transiit]

I'm seeing a lot of these responses get hung up on their personal idealism. I'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt that there is no significant astro-turfing going on here.

But after seeing a multitude of responses suggesting the complexity of graphics cards above all other device drivers, I sort of wonder: Are we believing a myth?

I see countless articles about how GPUs are such advanced pieces of tech. I see tons of anecdotal evidence about how more optimized they are.

But after years of hearing how good Card A is against Card B at API X vs API Y, I sort of wonder...wow, what a coincidence that both happen to be really good at their next possible market.

Device drivers are tricky business, no question. All I ever seem to see is the same arguments from interested passers-by explaining how they couldn't open up their drivers because they'd give away some secret, or there's no incentive to give away their secret sauce because they've spent so much more time and money than some other specialized sector.

I think at this point, I'd be as happy to see these companies open up their specs to the point of third-party ground-up implementations as I would hearing one of them go on the record as to their reasons why they feel they can't.

Re:Perhaps a different question...

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there's the question none dare ask: are Open Source drivers any good? I maintain a GPL'd app for Linux and it's simply impossible to use the ALSA APIs in a way that works on all sound cards. The Emu10kXs are easy-peasy, those drivers will eat anything and make you sound good. Intel-HDA is harder but manageable. Beyond that you take your life into your own hands pretty much.

By contrast, I'm a power user and the Nvidia binary drivers have never let me down through 4 generations of their hardware. The newest ones support OpenGL extensions so new that nothing else on Linux has them, and I for one appreciate that kind of support.

Dell Inspiron 2600

[Lonewolf666]

Look here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=265962
It seems that a bios update in Q1 2007 fixed the problem for some people. Unfortunately not for everyone, but that is something you could try.
Or maybe this one helps: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/ubuntu-on-dell-inspiron-2600-laptop-595259/
Or this one: http://www.apfrod.com/works/2008/03/15/ubuntu_8_04_hardy_heron_on_dell_inspiron_2600

All of it a bit more tricky than clicking on a setup program. So you get a taste of what Linux was like 10 years ago. Back then editing config files to get your drivers running was normal. Today, it is an exception with distributions like Ubuntu, and only needed in problem cases.

Linux Users vs hardcore Windows gamers?

[Marcion]

Nvidia is a company that exists to make money.The question that Nvidia needs to think about is whether the number of Linux users (including those on the EEEPC, high-end phones and more specialised embedded devices) have outgrown the number of hardcore Windows PC gamers?

Whatever you think about the answer to the question, I'm sure you will agree that going forwards, the growth in embedded devices will certainly increase faster than Windows gaming.

When a company makes an embedded device, time to market is often really critical, so of course it chooses whatever hardware causes the the least fuss. Nvidia might find that Intel and ATI will increasingly dominate this space.

If Nvidia wants a share of the open source market in five years time, then it needs to start planning for an open source driver now, e.g. not putting any more third party proprietary code in its driver.

How does that work?

[Anonymous Coward]

"worried competitors will use their own tricks against them."

The tricks can't be used against them, unless someone writes a trojaned driver for their card.

If the tweaks are hardware dependant, they can only be used on a card that copies the same hardware.

Besides, do you think that ATI doesn't have the capability to strip out the hardware design and reverse engineer NVidia's cards? NVidia can just as easily take from ATI's cards.

Unless they are patented. Or copyrighted.

And if they ARE patented/copyrighted rather than trade secret, there's no loss in releasing the information under the GPL, because your competitor can't improve YOUR code without improving the code for YOU.

Free development, in other words, from your competitor(s).

Re:How does that work?

[Austerity Empowers]

ATI and nVidia both share a lot of intellectual resources and economic conditions (i.e. the expensive western world). They're more concerned not with each other, but with the far east. If their chips become commodity, they will lose their shirts, particularly right now with MS destroying the PC gaming market.

Re:How does that work?

[IntlHarvester]

> If the tweaks are hardware dependant, they can only be used on a card that copies the same hardware.

A lot of it is GL and other optimizations. Graphic drivers frequently have specific game optimizations that create considerable improvements in frame rate. That's an advantage they wouldn't want to share.

Point is, I guess, that the software stack in graphic drivers are significantly more complex than network cards and so on.

Is this a technical or religious issue?

[jopet]

Is it technically impossible to provide for closed-source drivers in Linux? Or is this just yet another religious issue from people who want to force their own views on anyone else?

Many people simply want Linux as an alternative to Windows, and a good alternative it is already. But insisting on open-source drivers will make the situation worse, not better in the long run: more and more special-purpose hardware is getting attached to the computer; mobile devices, chipcard readers, entertainment devices, GPS devices ... the list goes on and on.

It is simply naive to think that we will get open-source drivers for all of these. We can be happy if we get some sort of half-baked closed source driver.

At the current moment I have the following devices that do not work fully with Linux:
    - A canon camera: PTP transfer works, but under Windows I can also remote control it, do timed picture grabs, remote view the sensor -- none of which works with Linux
    - A Garming GPS device: nearly nothing works under Linux, the software for managing (proprietary of course) maps is only available under Windows, routes management only works with that software
    - A Sony-Ericcson mobile phone: mounting as a removable device works, but there is no decent support for synchronizing as under Windows
    - All-in-one printer/fax/copier most of these do not work or are limited under Linux in comparison to Windows. Nearly all ink printers still have severe limitations under Linux.
    - Wireless: several cards I have tried to not work at all or do not supprot WPA
    - A digital multimeter: only comes with software that runs under Windows
    - A chip-card reader and the infrastructure to use it for secure payment and authentification - only usable under Windows and Mac.

I do not think that the make everything opensource issue is of such a high priority yet when all these things actually prevent the use of Linux: if somebody does have to use Windows or Mac to use any of the things they need, why should they use Linux in the first place?

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[JohnFluxx]

Do you really want a closed source driver that will only work on a certain kernel version for a certain distro and just hope that the manufactorer will keep it updated forever?

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[jopet]

I do't specifically want it but would certainly prefer it to no driver at all. And *that* is the situation we are currently in, unfortunately.

The current situation is a terrible ugly mess unless you are happy with just the core hardware components and not too new versions of them.
Look into the support forums of any distro about how users are struggling and getting frustrated, and I predict that this will get worse, not better in the future, because the development speed of new hardware increases, WLan, USB3, new chipsets, new mobile devices etc, will appear and get used by many people more and more.
Linux has to put #1 priority on somehow supporting this or it will forever remain an insignificant niche reserved to the technically inclined and geeks (on the desktop that is, but that is what we are talking about here).

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[ledow]

"Is it technically impossible to provide for closed-source drivers in Linux?"

No. But it provides an ENORMOUS technical and legal hurdle (nobody's even sure yet if binary kernel modules are legal in most countries, although the *intention* is that they are). Supporting closed-source means, at some point, freezing interfaces, which means supporting every version of every interface created indefinitely. That's an AWFUL lot of work that would have to be done by precisely the people who don't want to do it and have enough to do already. You are doubling their workload by this simple request.

"Many people simply want Linux as an alternative to Windows, and a good alternative it is already."

Correct. Unfortunately, that's up to THEM to do something about, because that's not why Linux existed, exists or continues to exist. Linux is an OS, so in that sense it's an alternative. But it's not Windows. It won't ever BE Windows. It's just an OS. Who here complains to Apple because the Mac doesn't work with their Windows-only printer? Very, very few people.

"But insisting on open-source drivers will make the situation worse, not better in the long run: more and more special-purpose hardware is getting attached to the computer; mobile devices, chipcard readers, entertainment devices, GPS devices ... the list goes on and on."

Yep. And none of it we know how to drive, how to support, how to operate, how to upgrade, how to interface or how to port to other machines (like, I don't know, all those other alternative OS's that don't have compatibility layers). It's all just "black boxes" that sometimes (often, actually) the manufacturer's don't even know how they work. Just throwing in drivers "because they work now" isn't any good in the future, and certainly isn't any better than saying "Well, you'll have to run DOS if you want X to work". What's the difference between that and "You have to use Linux kernel 2.5.12 and our binary-only driver v 1.4.1"? The latter is available now for all current closed-source Linux drivers too... I can run my ATI card on Linux 2.6.1 with an old ATI driver just dandy. I could never upgrade that machine, though. They stopped supporting my card and they made the last compatible release for kernel 2.6.15.

Closed source drivers work now and break (for certain) in the future. Open source drivers have trouble working now (although that's not certain) but work the same or better in the future. With company co-operation, that can turn into "works before the product is out, works until there aren't any products that use the same driver in the general marketplace". Look at some of the 10Gig cards, or NX-capable processsors - there were drivers in Linux for them before anyone had even put their products out on the market.

"It is simply naive to think that we will get open-source drivers for all of these."

But experience shows you wrong - every single network card vendor on the planet had the same idea of not supporting their cards. Now almost every single network card, from token ring to wireless-N, on the planet is supported, and usually supported under Linux first. The only hardware that *doesn't* work is stuff that people don't care enough about to reverse-engineer or to build a compatibility layer for, or where there are legal issues. For those same hardware, even the closed-source drivers are now usually, or will be soon. And to be honest, most of that stuff won't work in Vista, or ME, or 98, or DOS, or Mac or anything else. And in a few years time, it'll break BEYOND REPAIR even in Windows either by a Window Service Pack or the next version of Windows.

Intel have Open-Source chipsets. AMD/ATI are open-sourcing. RaLink release a set of GPL drivers for their wireless cards. *Virtually* every piece of hardware in the world (as a percentage of overall items sold, e.g. the "production-run-of-ten" cheap knock-off PCI cards that don't have OS drivers don't really count against the 10 million sound cards sold which run

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[jabjoe]

Exactly the points I would have made, but made better. ;-)

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[jopet]

Thank you for your long reply. I agree with most of what you say and I can only reiterate that I would certainly love to see open specifications and open drivers for everything out there. I never said that Linux should be like Windows -- but I would like to see it become an alternative to Windows that can be used in ways very similar to how people use Windows computers. And that means connecting a huge amount of strange hardware.

So yes, having open source drivers for everything would be great.
However I think that we can agree that this wont happen, even if some vendors already do provide this. So what remains is really more a strategic decision than a technical one: how should Linux development proceed in order to maximize user happyness.

I think you greatly exaggerate the issue of kernel versions. First, while interfaces do have and will change, it should not be that hard to find a comprimise and freese some stuff for a certain period in time. Second, *if* a company, for whatever reasons, commits to providing a closed source driver for linux, there will be a chance (though of course not a guarantee) for them to update the driver to newer kernel versions. It is already happening.

I do not think that experience proved me wrong and if you look at distro support forums and HW dbs you will find endless lists of devices that do not work, work only after endless hacks or produce contradicting results (because vendors do not care to document a change in chipset or similar). My fear is that this will get worse and that the reverse-engineering appraoch wont be able to keep up.

My fear is also, that more and more hardware where obfuscation and content licensing issues matter to the hardware vendors will become important: once that happens, the pressure on companies will be even higher not to go opensource.

I still think that kernel developers should do their best to make Linux a "friendly environment" that is intended to run with opensource drivers and applications, but that still will provide also a framework for closed source drivers and applications.
In other words, a friendly OS for users and companies.

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[ledow]

"And that means connecting a huge amount of strange hardware."

I would differ on this point. Most hardware works. Most of the hardware that doesn't is niche, old, obscure or rare. This doesn't mean we should be supporting it all, because most people who own it will KNOW that - every OS they try with have limited support for it. I own a vast array of hardware collected over the last decade from schools - there are esoteric, unusual, low-production, specialist, ancient, homebrew, brand-new and just plain weird hardware in my boxes. The vast majority of PC-compatible stuff works on Linux. The only examples I've personally found that DON'T work at all are:

- A £2 USB IrDA adaptor (the other ten just work). It's not detected and looking up the usb.ids list shows me that almost nobody else has one the same model - I suspect it was recalled or had a very limited production run.
- An ISA "video backer" card (uses VHS tape for backup through component video - 4Gb on a 180min tape!), actually, there is software for it but I couldn't get it to work (I wasn't trying hard). I reckon it's just too old for the kernel I was trying on. But then, I had to hunt around to find a computer with an ISA card - I found several dozen but most of them were too old to boot up or couldn't run even an ancient version of Linux/Windows/DOS.
- A handful of Winmodems that work with the proprietry "Linuxant" drivers if I pay for it. About a one in five ratio between working modems and non-working Winmodems out of the dozens I store. That's pretty damn good but still the worst ratio for any hardware I know.
- A parallel port scanner that I can't even connect to anything past Windows 95 without it crashing the machine dead. It gets conflicts if you have a soundcard installed at all, it crashes all the time, it doesn't allow ANYTHING to use its passthrough parallel port.

I estimate less than 1% of the hardware fails to work entirely, and less than 2% will load if you can use a binary driver. The rest is just pure hardware that just works. And this is in schools, where cheap crap gets priority and teachers buy things because a salesman says so. Examples of things that work include:

- PCI S3Virge card with FOUR S3 chips and four D-Sub outputs each (possibly the largest interface card you've ever seen in your life), for multi-displays back when SLI hadn't even been heard of.
- Electronic microscopes designed for Windows only.
- Various "control" hardware, including Lego, robots, the original floor turtles, hardware originally made to work with BBC Micro D->A convertors.
- Fingerprint scanners for library control systems (we don't use them for legal reasons).
- Card readers/writers
- Scanners that plug direct into ISA sockets (literally - the interface card is little more than a voltage-regulator with a plug on the back of the computer to plug the scanner in)
- Interface cables for Psion organisers that have been "customised" for educational use.

And most of that's before you get near the stuff made in the era when Open Source started to take hold. The Wiimote, for instance, was supported very, very quickly without any help from Nintendo. The OS drivers mean it works on all platforms now. It's being used in everything from military research to "over-the-net" hospital operations. All without Nintendo's help. But *with* Nintendo's help, it could be the de-facto controller for just about anything.

"So yes, having open source drivers for everything would be great. However I think that we can agree that this wont happen"

I don't think we *can* agree here. I don't see it happening *any time soon* and it will never be for *everything* but the vast majority of hardware that's out there already has OS drivers, whether by the manufacturer or third-parties.

"I think you greatly exaggerate the issue of kernel versions."

I honestly don't. Taking, for instance, the drivers for my ATI/nVidia cards (the closed-source binary in an open source wrapper) - every few mo

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[sricetx]

Linux needs to have a stable, ABI. There is no reason for a driver to stop working on a point update to the kernel. On windows, once the manufacture releases the driver they can be sure it will work until the next major version update. There were 7 years between the releases of Windows XP and Vista, that is a lot longer than linux kernel 2.6.20 to 2.6.22 for example.

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Supporting closed-source means, at some point, freezing interfaces, which means supporting every version of every interface created indefinitely. That's an AWFUL lot of work that would have to be done by precisely the people who don't want to do it and have enough to do already. You are doubling their workload by this simple request. I call BS on this argument. First, incompatible kernel interface changes will ALWAYS mean work for somebody. If a stable interface is not maintained, HW vendors that wrote Linux drivers will have to change, rebuild and retest - it doesn't matter if sources are open or closed, the work is the same.

By refusing to have a stable interface, the kernel developers are just offloading work from themselves into HW vendors. And it's a dumb transfer of work, because you have a single kernel and thousands of drivers, so the net effort of fixing all drivers affected by changes to some particular interface is MUCH larger than the effort to maintain a stable version of that interface. I'd even argue that *maintaining* these interfaces shouldn't be such a huge work - only the initial cration of such layer for the whole kernel is admittedly a big task. It would probably require a couple years and a bunch of top kernel hackers. Who are not interested in such an un-sexy task, that's all. But hit is a stupid strategy, because, due to not having a stable interface, the kernel team is forced to maintain thousands of drivers themselves. Linux kernel development would move much faster if top coders (up to Linus himself) wouldn't have to waste 90% fo their time fixing bugs in drivers for obscure I/O chipsets, SCSI, keyboard, ethernet cards etc.

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[skarpik]

As a favour to a friend, I spent several hours last night making a Winmodem work in Hardy Heron installation on a 2 or 3 year old HP computer. If this was a Windows computer, the modem would have recognized immediately by the OS and the computer would have been ready to connect to Internet via PPP without any sweat (that's what it was doing up to a couple of weeks ago when his hard drive died and I persuaded my buddy to go the Ubuntu route). Working with Ubuntu , I was forced to wade through all sorts of technical issues regarding getting a driver for the modem (scanModem works well but I just don't think such a tool should be necessary). Fortunately for my friend, I'm persistent, have a Ph.D. in computer science and used to run a lab based on Solaris (which gave me some insight into Linux). All I wanted is a driver for the damn modem. I didn't care and don't care where it came from. Even better, there'd be plug and play. The frustration was huge. I was cursing penguins, Linus Torvalds, OSS and geekdom in general. There's a heck of a lot that impressed me about Ubuntu but it was a real pain in the ass to work through this driver issue. My experience last night was certainly going to make no one in Microsoft worry about losing a customer (I work primarily on Windows servers and workstations).

My friend whose computer it is, is a non-techical person (almost a Luddite) who just wants to use his computer to do his job (he creates newsletters for an organic produce co-op). He would have never figured out how to set up his computer in a million years. I almost gave up and told him that he'd have to shell out the money for a Windows (he had lost his original XP installation CD). Fortunately for him I'm very stubborn.

I'm now very sceptical that Linux will see the mainstream unless the community can make things easier for users.

For all the valid criticisms of Apple and Microsoft, I think it can't be denied that they work towards usability for the average guy who doesn't know anything computers and doesn't care. That doesn't seem to be important to the world of Linux. My friend shouldn't have needed me to make his modem work.

Open source or not Linux needs drivers for devices in commodity-type computers that are easy for novices to install and use.

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[Burpmaster]

For all the valid criticisms of Apple and Microsoft, I think it can't be denied that they work towards usability for the average guy who doesn't know anything computers and doesn't care.

Because Microsoft and Apple wrote their own drivers for that modem, right? After all, that's what would be required for your conclusion to be supported by your anecdote.

That doesn't seem to be important to the world of Linux.

Uhh... Linux people DO want drivers. That's the point of the story. They want manufacturers to supply drivers for their OS just like the manufacturers already do for Microsoft's and Apple's.

Re:Is this a technical or religious issue?

[JohnFluxx]

The linux kernel has gone through several revisions of the USB interface, for example. Now just about every USB driver can work at close to the full theoritical usb speed.

If linux had a stable ABI, it would severely hampen such development.

No example of open source driver that doesn't suck

[DraconPern]

Is there an example of an open source driver that doesn't suck? Even the radeonhd driver which ATI sponsored with Novell still sucks. Perhaps a successful example of better drivers from going open source will convince them instead of a bunch of names on a website?

Re:games have trouble making money on windows alre

[Hucko]

I'm totally bewildered at how all these companies whose product it pirated more than it is bought are able to stay in business so long. Really, both the music and the games industry should be back to relying on hobbiest *at best* if their argument had any aspect of truth to it. And the mining industry should have left Australia because of the excessively high wages it has to pay here...

"incorporate third party code"

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, NVidia USED to say that. They said it was stuff by SGI.

When SGI were talked to, they said that nothing NVidia had from them they have a problem with GPLing. So either

a) They lied
b) They have stuff from SGI that they are hiding because they haven't paid for it
c) They have another reason for it

Now NVidia don't say this any more, just fans of NVidia. Even if NVidia did say, they won't say any more WHOSE IP they have so we can ask this supplier about it.

Autocad?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few (one at least, I don't have the magazine in front of me). The one I can see in my head but can't remember the name of retails for $600 for a single user and the professional version is over a grand. Closed source but works on Linux.

You aren't looking.

Re:Autocad?

[somersault]

Well I had a look again just now, and there is Pro/Engineer, I'd thought that that only ran under WINE, but apparently I was thinking of Solidworks, and there is a full Linux version of Pro/Engineer. Even so, it would still be difficult to convince the engineers and management of any need to move to Linux. And there are still no professional quality 'free' 3D Engineering CAD solutions. To be fair, the cost of the software is negligible compared to the of yearly support contracts. We have been paying ~£8000 a year for support and upgrades to Inventor (I think the licenses are around £500 for an indefinite client license), and ~£12000 for ANSYS/CFX licenses and suppport. ANSYS and CFX do have Linux versions, though not all the plugins we use (mostly for blade modelling and simulation) are available on Linux.

If we were going to move to Pro/Engineer on Linux we'd need a decent versioning software tailored for engineering projects (maybe one exists, I've never used any versioning software before, admittedly I could just write one myself, it wouldn't be that big of a deal), and we'd only be able to use it for new projects as all our current models and assemblies are in Inventor. When MS start trying to force Vista onto the workplace then maybe that won't sound like such a bad idea to management though, will have to wait and see.

Re:Autocad?

[dotancohen]

There are a few (one at least, I don't have the magazine in front of me). The one I can see in my head but can't remember the name of retails for $600 for a single user and the professional version is over a grand. Closed source but works on Linux.

You aren't looking.

I don't have to look, I have to use what my shop is using. I don't exist in a vacuum. In my country, Solidworks is used just about everywhere. Without Solidworks, not only am I out of the company, I'm out of the industry.

My industry, and therefore me, is married to Solidworks. And that means that I'm married to whatever OS Solidworks runs on. Please, write to these guys and help me get out of this mess:
http://www.solidworks.com/pages/company/SolidWorksOfficeWorldwide.html

Re:No example of open source driver that doesn't s

[crimperman]

Is there an example of an open source driver that doesn't suck? Kernel driver? I'm sure there is but I'm not always sure which ones have been written by the manufacturer.
Fro non-kernel drivers HPLIP is a pretty good example of a company opening up it's driver base properly and with some success http://hplip.sourceforge.net/. I still wish they'd notify of Linux support on the boxes though.

Re:License?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Really? Being able to see the innards of a working driver plus (if it's GPL3) getting an irrevocable patent license is as bad as it being closed source?

The BSD crowd do have some good arguments, but trying to equivocate GPLed software with proprietary software just makes you all look like idiots.

Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[Toreo asesino]

I can take a nvidia driver built 8 years ago and still load it into Windows today, unmodified. I can install Windows 2000 (no SP), and upgrade to Windows XP SP3 and that same driver will work just the same. Not all drivers of course, but most. Generally, drivers in Windows get refreshed every 5-10 years. If I upgrade my linux kernel a single version in Ubuntu my proprietary nvidia drivers break instantly.

I think it's unreasonable to expect every hardware vendor to provide open-source drivers (even if it would benefit the users); so in my mind, Linux needs to get better at binary compatibility as well as focussing on making the open-source drivers real good.

Re:Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[domatic]

Install the "restricted drivers" package that matches the kernel you're installing. It's a tickbox in the graphical package manager. I've been running NVidia drivers in Ubuntu for years now and haven't had to recompile kernels or any other such whackery to do it. Why is it that failure to understand how to use Windows isn't a problem with Windows but failure understand Linux is a problem with Linux?

Re:Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[tomz16]

You mean, aside from the fact that the included driver is rarely the latest, fully-featured driver from nvidia, and doesn't include the nvidia control panel utility... Ever try to configure dual monitors with your driver? or, how about the fact that it doesn't really support older branches of nvidia video cards all that well? or, how about the fact that this magical "tickbox" you speak of doesn't exist in every distro. (I assume you are referring to ubuntu, which is NOT synonymous with "linux".) Even in ubuntu, this mystical checkbox of yours is a relatively new thing, grasshopper. If you are going to go the easy route, you may as well promote envy instead of some tickbox that is pretty much only good for getting novices to the eyecandy quicker.

Re:Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[Bert64]

XP SP3 is considered an obsolete version of windows that is being phased out.... Good luck getting your 8 year old nvidia card working in vista.

To contrast that, i have a printer/scanner combo of similar age... It works with XP and OSX 10.4/PPC... The HP drivers don't work in Leopard either on PPC or x86, nor do they work with vista. There are open source drivers for this device that do work in the latest linux distros (this printer/scanner works out of the box on ubuntu 8.04).
There are also no drivers for 64bit xp, but 64bit linux handles it just fine.

I can also use it on linux running on exotic hardware (sparc, mips, ia64, alpha, ppc) without issue, and there's no reason the drivers couldn't be ported to other platforms.

Closed source drivers limit what you can do... As we move to 64bit hardware, what happens to all those old devices which never had 64bit drivers written? What if IA64 had taken off instead of x86... What if those mips based laptops from china take off? What if i want to connect a printer to my phone or some other handheld device? I don't want to be at the mercy of hardware developers any more than i have to (ie inherent physical limitations of the hardware).

Re:Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[Toreo asesino]

OK, please don't hear what I'm not saying; I sincerely believe Open Source drivers would be better; I'm just saying I think Linux would really benefit as a platform if it could handle propriety drivers better than it does. Windows has always been really good at that typically, and that was my point.

Re:Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[domatic]

You mean, aside from the fact that the included driver is rarely the latest, fully-featured driver from nvidia, and doesn't include the nvidia control panel utility...

nvidia-settings - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
nvidia-glx-new 169.12+2.6.24.13-19.42
nvidia-settings - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver

Reasonably new and the panel is available as are utilities for such things as dual monitors. "Legacy" drivers are available for older NVidia cards.....and said situation is squarely in NVidia's court until the Noveau people do more of the thankless job of reverse engineering their cards. And I've done dual monitors and mirrored to a TV. It wasn't that hard, entailed use of an older 440MX card, and was done entirely with graphical utilities.

And if I absolutely needed the newest driver, NVidia does a decent job of providing an automagical installer that isn't all that hard. It isn't as pretty as ticking a box in package manager but you don't need much more intellect than a monkey to do it. I've had more trouble with bare metal XP installs. Try installing XP on a machine with a recent SATA controller. Once you post something to the effect of NLite, DriverPacks or a 5 year old USB floppy making that easy then you are well in the land of not being able to assert that Windows is automagical paradise. I've likewise had extreme fun with a older ScanWise scanner that Just Worked with Debian.

Does Windows make some things easier than Linux? Sure. Do some Windows advocates look around at the shiny walls before chucking rocks?

how about the fact that this magical "tickbox" you speak of doesn't exist in every distro.

Recent desktop oriented distros have such ways. Fedora and SuSE seem to have equivalents for all this. If you consciously picked something like Gentoo or Slackware in light of the voluminous documentation that such things are for experts than that is your own fault.....

Even in ubuntu, this mystical checkbox of yours is a relatively new thing, grasshopper

Away under the bridge with you! I don't recall personally attacking anyone. It's here now isn't it? Which is something ELSE I've noticed: No matter how much people work their hearts out to improve things, someone always has to post snarky rants.

Re:Linux needs to work better with proprietary

[Bert64]

The trouble is, the existence of closed source drivers which are "good enough" for many people divert a lot of resources away from producing open drivers.

Re:License?

[PakProtector]

Some of us enjoy being free to do whatever we want with code, instead of being forced to do what others want us to do with it.

BSD == Freedom for the Coder

GPL == Freedom for the Code.

So it's all about what you care about more. Do you value your own, personal, freedom more, or less, than the freedom of some pattern of electrical charges inside a computer?

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[KevMar]

Honestly, why does it matter if they provide the source as long as they provide drivers that work?

I could see NVidia never giving in. NVidia's drivers are not just hardware drivers. They are a software product all their own. NVidia has invested heavily in them. They have as many people working on the drivers as they do the hardware.

They gain no benifit from releasing the code.

My Lexmark is extremely Linux compatible

[Jamie Lokier]

I have a Lexmark color laser printer too. It's a C522N. It worked out of the box with Linux - no special drivers required. In fact it works with everything - it accepts PDF and Postscript and just prints them - no trouble, nice quality. It works with CUPS, and correctly tells my desktop when there's a problem like no paper.

It was cheap too, and is now a few years old - but it has newer successors in the same range.

As mine was so cheap, I don't understand why anybody would buy the versions which need special drivers.

I highly recommend this printer for Linux use.

Re:My Lexmark is extremely Linux compatible

[kauos]

I have the C532dn. Basically I wanted it because it prints duplex. To Lexmark's credit it does sort of work out of the box with the standard drivers. But to get the high resolutions and some of the extra features I needed the 3rd party driver. But I knew all that before I bought it so I'm not bagging Lexmark over it. I was just offering a potential workaround.

Re:My Lexmark is extremely Linux compatible

[Jamie Lokier]

I haven't noticed any lack of resolution. My printer dialogue says 4800dpi, and the page looks good. Perhaps that's because I extracted the PPD (Postscript Printer Description) file from the Windows driver, for CUPS to use :-)

I really should submit it to the CUPS PPD database.

Re:My Lexmark is extremely Linux compatible

[kauos]

Actually I think you're right. I got the TurboPrint drivers originally so I could get the extra resolution for my Canon IP6700D Pixma, not the Lexmark C532dn. But I have this recollection of trying the new TurboPrint drivers with the Lexmark, and the TurboPrint drivers ended up giving a lot more configurable options than the free driver (and a better print quality as well I think, but my memory is hazy). Didn't know you could extract directly from the Windows drivers. Imagine how annoyed I'll be if I ever found out that's all that TurboPrint has done :)

IP rights of drivers' content

[DrYak]

The problems is also that there's a lot of "imaginary property" from very diverse source going into both the graphic card and the driver.

Companies can seldom "just release the source" of the drivers. They should either go the trouble of contacting all the 3rd party which were mandated to built parts and renegotiate a new agreement allowing the opening of the final product.
Or they should go the trouble of slowly re-writting a non NDA'ed documentation, that could be published freely on the net. But which would require systematic checks with legal department and such to be sure that nobody will suddenly sue because that publication was an infringement.

In both situation the work is non trivial, and lots of efforts are necessary. Several company simply decide not to go through all those hoops just to please what they see as a very small and marginal fraction of their market.

Nonetheless that didn't prevent Intel to pay teams to build drivers that where open source in the first place, ATI/AMD to decide to take the bull by the horn and *really go* through all the adventure of building legally releasable documentation (see also their promise that the next generations of GPU will have their video acceleration built more independently from the IP-protected DRM - currently their license of HDCP technology poses problem for opening the video unit) and VIA to finally release their code open because they don't have much 3rd party IP in there to begin with (see the whole "OEM will have to provide their own software solution for the H264 coding - we didn't buy one, we wanted the chip to be cheap" fiasco on Windows. It's a fiasco on windows, but makes it more easy to release on Linux).

Why not standardise the hardware?

[Bert64]

Why does hardware need to be so non standard and proprietary requiring its own drivers?

Take for example USB1, all USB controllers from many different manufacturers work with generic UHCI or OHCI drivers.

USB2 is even better, since all controllers support EHCI.

SATA potentially has AHCI, tho not all controllers support it.

Most CPUs have the x86 instruction set.

Video cards have VGA/SVGA/VESA, tho these specs are obviously far too old to be useful today.

Sound cards have soundblaster compatibility, and more recently AC97.

Proper modems have the Hayes command set, not counting some software modems.

Printers have postscript, tho typically only higher end printers support it.

If you have standards in hardware then the issue of drivers goes away... Your OS can provide drivers for the standard hardware, and thus not have third party driver code in the kernel... This would cure the Linux driver problem, and cure a majority of Windows crashes.

Re:Why not standardise the hardware?

[Tatsh]

Both nVidia and ATI have profit motive. By standardising the hardware, you are essentially giving away specifications (at least some). ATI may be giving away specifications, but I still have not seen the 3D specifications yet (they say they are coming). This may force nVidia into at least thinking about releasing specifications, but I am not sure that they would.

Having standards for this would be great, especially in the way a card implements instruction sets like OpenGL. If you have a standard, it seems like everyone would want to meet that standard and nothing more. There is no motivation to exceed it. And if it is exceeded, will those specifications be released? If so, then the company has just done extra work for nothing monetary in return.

It is (I guess) unfortunate at times, but you have to be making money no matter who you are. Your motive has to be profit most of the time, in the current economy.

Re:Why not standardise the hardware?

[Bert64]

The spec would dictate functionality, not performance...
The x86 instruction set is well defined, and implemented by multiple vendors, yet they don't all perform the same.
Extensions to the instruction set come out from time to time, and are published, subsequently implemented by the other vendors and become part of the standard. New instructions are typically not used very widely until all the vendors have implemented them.

Re:Why not standardise the hardware?

[Grishnakh]

Why does hardware need to be so non standard and proprietary requiring its own drivers?

Generally, because it costs more and/or is more difficult to do things according to a standard rather than just hacking together your own proprietary "standard".

Take for example USB1, all USB controllers from many different manufacturers work with generic UHCI or OHCI drivers.
USB2 is even better, since all controllers support EHCI.

Yep. USB certainly isn't perfect (the Firewire fans will readily tell you), but one thing they did right was having standards for the host controllers, so you don't need special drivers for them, just like you don't need special drivers for your PCI bus.

SATA potentially has AHCI, tho not all controllers support it.

Nope, they screwed up SATA by not sticking with the standard.

Video cards have VGA/SVGA/VESA, tho these specs are obviously far too old to be useful today.

This was useful a long time ago, but it's been a long time since CGA/EGA/VGA were the main standards. VESA tried to standardize all the above-VGA resolutions, but that didn't last long. Now, it's a complete mess, though back in those days, 3D accelerators didn't really exist, so it's a bit of a different problem. Now with 3D acceleration and all the other available features, everything relies on vendor-specific drivers, though at least (unlike the old days) there's only 3 main vendors of GPUs so that keeps things from being too chaotic.

Sound cards have soundblaster compatibility, and more recently AC97.

No one uses Soundblaster compatibility any more; that was important in 1995. However, AC97 is still an important standard, though Intel HD Audio is slowly replacing it. A lot of sound chips seem to still require special drivers though.

Proper modems have the Hayes command set, not counting some software modems.

It's been a long time since I've used a telephone modem, but even the software modems had Hayes command sets. It's just that that was all implemented in software, instead of hardware.

Printers have postscript, tho typically only higher end printers support it.

Yep, decent printers have used Postscript at least since I was in college (1992), and it's pretty lame that not all printers support it and/or PDF by now. But it's cheaper to implement everything in software, so that's what they do for crappy low-end printers. Luckily, decent laser printers don't cost that much these days, so there's really no excuse (especially when you consider the lifetime cost of an inkjet after all those overpriced ink refills).

Most CPUs have the x86 instruction set.

That's really an accident of history. There's more to a CPU than the names of the instructions, such as the number of registers. Compared to other architectures, Intel architecture has traditionally been "register starved". This can affect performance in a huge way. There's a good reason low-power ARM processors don't use the Intel ISA. But even Intel CPUs have different ISAs: the PIII ISA is different from the P4 one, and the Core2 one, etc. While something compiled for a PII will run on all of them, software can be optimized for that particular processor, yielding performance improvements.

The problem with standards, though, is that it takes a lot of work to implement them, vendors almost never do it faithfully (they're always adding their own special "extensions", which then require special drivers), and that it can hold back development. While they can be helpful for some things (like USB host controllers), from my point-of-view as a Linux user, it's really far more important that vendors open their specs so that open-source drivers can be developed (even better if the vendor develops and submits them when the hardware is released). That way, they can do things however they want, and I can still use the hardware without any limitations, and I don't have to worry about not being able to use it in the future if the vendor decides to stop maintaining the drivers.

Re:Why not standardise the hardware?

[Big Jojo]

Why does hardware need to be so non standard and proprietary requiring its own drivers?

Since different markets have different requirements. In most cases, innovation requires new hardware interfaces. And there are substantial engineering costs involved in conforming to a standard, including more testing than is otherwise needed.

Take for example USB1, all USB controllers from many different manufacturers work with generic UHCI or OHCI drivers. USB2 is even better, since all controllers support EHCI.

UHCI is found only on PC hardware. OHCI is pretty widespread, true, but many newer chips aim to come out with high speed host support and that's only full speed. EHCI is found mostly on systems with PCI, though there are a few non-PCI versions. Non-PC hardware has quite a variety of other standards ... optimized for things like lower power, less chip area, OTG support, and ease of implementing as a discrete non-PCI chip.

If you have standards in hardware then the issue of drivers goes away... Your OS can provide drivers for the standard hardware

But then you also prevent hardware level innovations of many interesting types. Have you ever participated in standards development by the way? All vendors doing so are careful to avoid letting their competitors get too much of an advantage. It's hardly ever a case of adoptiong or developing a technically optimal solution.

Yep ditched my NVidia 64bit mobo...

[TooTechy]

because the nvidia sata drivers just are not stable enough. A box that crashes every month or so is not reliable enough.

Now the lovely 64bit Intel replacement board is as solid as a rock.

Better performance on Windows?

[RobBebop]

For example nVidia has historically had very good OpenGL performance on Windows.

I am not familiar with the nVidia video card market, so this statement is purely speculation that others can discuss, confirm, deny, or mod into oblivion...

Is it possible that there are "Microsoft incentives" that helps convince nVidia to remain proprietary? It seems that it would hurt Microsoft really bad to lose any of their best partners, and a company that makes video cards would certainly qualify.

Love to help

[Danathar]

But I'm really not sure where to start. I took C in college years ago, and really just dabble in in here and there (no serious work).

Kernel development and driver development seems like the equivalent of black magic. I could never understand the code.

So what does an intelligent but ignorant C beginner do if you want to go into writing drivers for LINUX?

Re:Love to help

[djcapelis]

>So what does an intelligent but ignorant C beginner do if you want to go into writing drivers for LINUX?

You don't. Sorry, but "I took C in college years ago" isn't enough for driver development. You'll need a lot more OS and arch knowledge before you should venture there.

Which isn't to say you can't help. Just you won't be very useful for kernel code. There are plenty of open-source projects which would love to have a new developer. Cut your teeth here for several years here. Get as deep into these as you can, constantly move lower and lower into the guts and messy areas in the stack.

OS code, especially driver code, is all guts and messy. You need to learn to handle this in a userspace context first and you need to be able to write this type of code without much thought.

You'll know when you're ready.

(In fact, being ready is almost defined by the fact that you won't have to ask the question on where to start. Something will annoy you one day and suddenly you'll find yourself staring at a problem that you can only solve by diving into the kernel code. And if you feel comfortable about diving straight in... then you'll be ready. Then be prepared to start from the very beginning all over again with almost all of your patches not making it into the kernel at first.)

They are not just asking they are offering!

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not just asking they are also offering the benefits of many eye-balls their source!

Re:They are not just asking they are offering!

[BlackSnake112]

Companies do not see the many eyeballs to their source as a good thing. They see that as giving their competition free and easy access to their code hence losing any advantage. That is an uphill battle with many businesses. One that will take time to over come.

Video Cards Are the Problem

[christoofar]

I'm getting pretty tired of the proprietary ATI and nVidia drivers, which seem to be a resurging problem with getting working with full 3D capability with the proprietary drivers by both vendors.

The quality of the closed drivers has always been rather poor, especially with ATI, and it has complicated efforts to get products such as Compiz-fusion working properly. Combine that with distributions who try their hardest to get video detection and seamless configuration working in their installers and you have a frustrating environment where first time users to open systems such as *BSD and Linux suffer because of the installation headaches.

I'm a seasoned user of Linux, who has been on Slackware since 1995 and now on OpenSuSE. I write .NET and Java code for a living and I rely on VMWare for Linux to do my job.

But when I get a kernel update, I cringe and avoid installing it--for fear of having to go through the nightmare of getting my proprietary video drivers working again with compiz-fusion. I'm several kernel releases behind and with my ATI drivers, I'm about 7 releases behind--only because the last time I had to do video configuration, it took me about 24-hours worth of trial and effort to get my video drivers stable again.

Now that OpenSuSE 11.0 is out, I'm gonna have to spend a long weekend with an experimental partition to see how much work it will take me to get compiz working nicely with my ATI Radeon card at work and my integrated mobile Radeon card at home.

Re:Video Cards Are the Problem

[dbcad7]

But when I get a kernel update, I cringe and avoid installing it

Kernel updates are 99.99 % unnecessary most of the time, for the average user.. really they should just limit it to major version releases.. or otherwise make it to where you have to go looking to install it until the next version.

Brother supports GPL

[nappingcracker]

Brother has pretty good linux support, their models are not quite as fancy as HP, but they release drivers for LPR and CUPS and the CUPS have source available.

I think I read about that here a year or so ago.

http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html

Lexmark and Nvidia on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a lexmark printer working from linux, perfectly. It speaks pcl5 and postscript. I also had an ATI card, bought because it had "better" driver support on linux.

In practise, now that I switched to the binary-only NVIDIA kernel, I find the X driver quality is far better.

nVidia will eat itself

[rgviza]

AMD/ATI will fix nVidia 8)

Their driver quality is already on par with nVidia's on linux. Soon it will exceed nVidia's quality, therefore the hardware will be better (since it will work better). ATI's got thousands of eyes looking at the driver code now, where before it might have been 10. This will spill back into windows as other third parties start writing drivers with the supplied specs.

Interesting because I expected this to take at least a year (from last September).

ATi is already ahead of my expectations and my next mobo is an AMD crossfire chipset (which I'm ordering at the end of the month)

8)

nVidia chipsets are terrible. The only thing keeping me there was ATi's terrible driver quality so SLi was the only way to go for the last couple of years. First it was the buggy MCP-55 on the 590 chipset, now it's the memory voltage issues on the 790i. I'm simply not going there again.

I'm still living with the hitching on the 590 I have (due to the buggy southbridge timer, interrupts aren't handled properly and distributed to the cores correctly. this leads to irregular hitching in games due to the choppy interrupt handling) and it's actually a miracle that the linux kernel (and windows) crews were able to handle the issue in the kernel at all.

nVidia is going down... their chipset hardware is substandard and rarely works correctly and this will hurt their GPU sales unless they get on the ball since you need an nVidia chipset to use multiple nVidia GPUs.

It's simply crap at the electrical level. They don't know what they are doing. If you don't believe me, google "790i chipset memory problem"

Then google "590 MCP-55 timer bug". Their primary market is enthusiasts and they are destroying their reputation, and squelching the press (Tom's hardware etc) won't hide it. This, combined with the AMD open source cooperation is the perfect storm that will eventually kill them unless they start making better quality hardware.

AMD has had it's share of issues but at least they admit it when they have a problem and fix it. nVidia doesn't and they are building shit for chipsets. It's too bad only the enthusiasts know what's up, if everyone else cared and really knew what was up, nVidia would be out of business rather quickly.

They need to stick to GPU's and forget about chipsets. It's obvious after a few years that they won't be able to pull it together.

-AC

Re:nVidia will eat itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Their driver quality is already on par with nVidia's on linux.

People love this quip. Too bad it's not true.

Re:nVidia will eat itself

[Tatsh]

Completely agree. The only stable driver is still 8.40.2 (for me with an Radeon Xpress 200M), and it sucks completely. No compositing with 3d simultaneously. I have a computer with a GeForce 6100 and it can do compositing and 3D simultaneously just fine with the proprietary driver.

Developers should not criticise nVidia so much as ATI/AMD. At least nVidia gives a crap about the quality of their module, even if it is proprietary. Why? Because many companies use Maya in Linux (often rendering farms) and therefore have nVidia cards (especially Quadro's).

I see motive, and it involves a few things. Microsoft, because they want to push DirectX/Windows, the computer manufacturers refusing anything other than Windows to be installed. Show that ATI cards run like crap on Linux, and people assume Linux is crap. This is a big problem. Developers should criticise ATI way more, not nVidia. For nVidia it goes the other way: show that nVidia cards work great in Linux (even though a proprietary module), and graphics developers (Pixar for example) want Linux boxes.

Other than that, maybe we need a community-funded hardware project to make a video card and future models (with standards to follow) that supports all that the current cards support (yes, this is expensive). EVERYONE who cares (the true GNU fans) will buy the end result, which will most probably cost more than a regular nVidia or AMD card, but it will be worth it. A card that has no limitations other than the limitations of the hardware itself. Neither nVidia nor AMD give us this with their proprietary drivers.

Re:Buy a different movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

... except that it's not like that at all. Seriously, think your analogies through before posting them.

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[quanticle]

They are a software product all their own.

How so? nVidia drivers are useless if I don't have an nVidia card. I'm not paying nVidia for their drivers, I'm paying them for their graphics cards.

They have as many people working on the drivers as they do the hardware.

And, by releasing code to the community, they could have even more people working on their drivers, perhaps adding features and conveniences that the original engineers had not thought of.

They gain no benifit from releasing the code.

On the other hand, they could benefit tremendously. nVidia's binary drivers already have a fairly good reputation on Linux. Open source drivers would only enhance that reputation, further entrenching nVidia's dominance in the growing open source market. Also, as people add features to the open source driver, the driver would become a product in its own right, and would become a justification for buying the card (much like what happened with the Netgear WRT54g).

Let "Open" markets guide them ...

[OldHawk777]

I no longer recommend NVidia motherboards or video cards in any server/desktop/laptop configurations.

Market share always persuades the most intransigent businesses, but some may wait till bankruptcy looms like IBM in the early 80s.

Re:License?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Yeah, but if you recall, this was about whether the GPL is better than the software being entirely closed source, so let's expand that:

BSD == Freedom for the Coder.

GPL == Freedom for the Code.

Proprietary == Freedom for No One.

In this case, I think the hardware manufacturers wouldn't like people legally using their code in closed source products without them even getting anything in return, so they're not going to use BSD-style licenses. If they use the GPL or similar, we get the code and freedom to poke around in it, and they get the ability to stop people using that code in closed source products without paying for some sort of commercial license. It's the best compromise we're going to get.

Re:No example of open source driver that doesn't s

[Bert64]

Yeah, HP really should provide HPLIP on the CD with the printer, and a link to the latest version, and mention linux support on the box... With the current crop of linux based mini laptops, it might help sale for printers and such like to explicitly advertise compatibility with linux.

The RadeonHD driver is relatively new, and the documentation from ATI has been coming out fairly slow (some of the 3d specs were only released a few weeks ago), all things considered the driver is coming along just fine.
Aside from that, many linux users have been buying intel (open drivers) or nvidia (better drivers than ati's) cards... As radeonhd matures you can expect linux users to choose ati cards instead, which will serve to increase interest in the drivers.

An older example would be the Matrox video drivers, which were open sourced and ended up outperforming the windows drivers written by matrox quite considerably. To the point that Matrox cards using the open drivers were outperforming theoretically faster cards (with inferior drivers).

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[CompMD]

Siemens NX runs on Linux and is fully supported. I've been a user and beta tester for Unigraphics/NX CAD software for quite some time, and was one of the first people to ever run NX on Linux in a commercial environment. Siemens actually charges *less* for media and support for the Linux version than for the Windows version.

I currently have a mixed environment of CAD systems running on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. I have no interoperability problems with NX between them. In fact, the Linux version feels a little quicker and a little more stable. I don't know what the going price for SolidWorks is (I deal with Unigraphics/NX, CATIA and ACAD mostly) but if you just want solid and surface modeling and drafting capabilities, you might want to see how much those licensed features would cost for NX.

Re:License?

[debatem1]

Not sure I'm understanding what you mean by that. I will admit that the situation with GPL'd drivers and kernel modules is insane, though.

Re:License?

[BrainInAJar]

Yes. Fellow by the name of Masayuki Murayama was writing NIC drivers for Solaris using the Linux drivers as reference. He received legal threats as a result claiming he was infringing on the GPL.

So, what's the use in them being open-source if the only people that can look at it are people who write code for Linux ( the only major GPL kernel out there )

Re:License?

[NotInfinitumLabs]

BSD == Freedom for the Coder.

GPL == Freedom for the Code.

Christ, stop posting this. The GPL provides the users the four freedoms. It ensures these freedoms are preserved by imposing the restriction that you must provide anyone else that you give the software the to same freedoms that were provided to you. It's not fucking about "freedom for the code".

Re: I don't think you understand...

[znerk]

I don't think you understand. We didn't buy the printer for an Ubuntu box and find that it didn't work. We installed Ubuntu as dual-boot on a Windows PC and found that the existing Lexmark printer wouldn't work under Linux. I think you missed the point of the post you replied to. It said

one thing linux users can do is to buy things that don't work to return them to the vendor. When vendors will be tired of that, they will ask manufacturers to make drivers. I understood that to mean that we should go and purchase printers, "discover" that they don't work under Linux, and return them as defective because they do not function in our "OS of choice". This generates a loss for the vendor/distributor, which will either result in the vendor complaining to the manufacturer about their product's (lack of) compatibility, or will result in the vendor hitting the manufacturer in the pocketbook by ceasing to carry their products. Either way, it makes waves and gets our point across, without costing us anything in the end, as we get refunded the purchase price when we return the "defective" product.

--
Reading comprehension ftw!

Re:License?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Why the hell are you posting this in response to me? I copied and pasted that in order to show the original "GPL is no better than closed source!" thing was total bullshit.

FWIW, I think the description has some truth to it. The GPL may not have been referred to as that by the Free Software Foundation, but it is mostly accurate. The question is really about which is considered more important. I think the GPL is good and necessary, especially in this case, but others disagree. I don't mind that they do, I just hate it when they get all hysterical and start going on about software being GPLed as if it's the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Linux driver project / LDD

[Sits]

Take a look at the Linux driver project or something like GregKH's driver tutorial. You aren't alone in wanting to write drivers for Linux. The catch is that most (new) hardware with specs actually already has drivers available on Linux.

The trick is to start with simple hardware and then work your way up (graphics card drivers ARE hard especially if they have to be reverse engineered). There are also books like the fantastic Linux Device Drivers that describe how drivers can be written.

(Writing drivers is not impossible but it does take time to become good and without specs it's is a tricky trial and error process. If you're even a bit interested, dive in!)

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[LingNoi]

Nvidia drivers don't work on PPC, etc.

Also there's been an Nvidia bug that has been effecting the latest Trunk of the Ogre 3d engine on Linux. If we had access to the code, we wouldn't have to ask nvidia to check it out for us and there could already be a fix.

*sigh* BSD trolls on the rise..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes BSD preserves your freedom to get me involved in a patent lawsuit, what's your point?

Out of ink? Scanner won't work.

[kickassweb]

My HP All In One will stop working completely if it's out of ink. Even for functions that don't REQUIRE ink. Like Scanning.

Oh, and the plastic tray that holds the paper? Held in place by two tiny little flimsy plastic dimples that are NOT cat proof. They broke off right about the time the warranty ran out.

The drivers suck too. Worse than Norton for taking over a system.

I will NEVER buy another HP anything.

Re:License?

[NotInfinitumLabs]

Whoops, apologies, I didn't look too closely to see who I was replying to.

Re: Regarding HP support for Mac OS X

[Douglas Goodall]

I had huge driver problems recently with HP and Mac OS X. I called their technical support people and asked them what version of the Mac OS they were running on their test machines. It was three versions down level. They cannot be expected to give good support if they don't even have current version reference equipment to test on. I am not buying any more HP printers.

Re: You Don't Understand the Market

[Douglas Goodall]

These days there is a fine line between hardware and software. Many times the hardware consists of little more than a FPGA that implements the hardware component. The total solution consists of the necessary hardware and software to do the job. If you need performance, you do what you can in the driver then enhance the hardware if necessary. If you were sitting in the FPGA programmer's seat, your idea of hardware and software would be less distinct. In the case of a controller card, the hardware of the card and the driver software does whatever is necessary to drive the target device. Simple hardware performing complex functions requires more than simple interface driver logic. A SCSI driver board used to contain several chips. This was before DMA. The SCSI software driver was under 1k of code. Oh you want DMA, Interrupts, parallel processing, RAID0156... Well send over a spec, we will do what we need to in hardware and everything else will be done in the driver. Other kinds of hardware have similar stuff going on. Hardware acceleration is a nice feature, and robust error correcting drivers make a nicer product. Oh you want a manual too? That is more. You only want to pay a little? What do you want us to scrimp on? What? You want all the performance, the features, and the source code too? Ha ha ha

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[dotancohen]

Thanks. Can you open, edit, and save Solidworks parts and share them with Solidworks users?

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[Grishnakh]

The counterpoint to this is that Nvidia doesn't want all the nice features and conveniences in the drivers being used with the competitions' cards. There's probably not that much difference in the way ATI's and Nvidia's cards work, and driver code for one could probably be easily made to work on the other, just like other classes of similar devices share their driver code to a large degree (V4L devices, USB devices, etc.).

From the users' point of view (and kernel and X developers'), it's certainly better to share code between different graphics cards makers' drivers, since this simplifies things, reduces bugs, reduces maintenance, etc. From Nvidia's POV, it's not so great, because apparently, much like winmodems, they've put a lot of stuff into their drivers instead of hardware. You say Nvidia's binary drivers have a fairly good reputation on Linux (they seem to work pretty well for me too), but it's possible that if they were open-sourced, others would take this code and refactor it so it also works for ATI cards. Then, a Linux user would get good driver code no matter which 3D card they bought, and obviously that doesn't help Nvidia.

Personally, I think it's just a matter of time until this binary-only video driver stuff dies out. IIRC, Intel already has OS drivers for their 3D chips (which are admittedly not in the same class as the others, being only available built onto motherboards), and ATI has already released specs for their hardware. The "Nouveau" team is already in the process of making 3D drivers for Nvidia cards. Pretty soon, either Nvidia will have to release their drivers as open-source because all the competition already is, or their binary drivers won't be needed because of Nouveau, or they'll lose Linux marketshare (which is important for all the big renderfarms).

Re:License?

[Grishnakh]

So, what's the use in them being open-source if the only people that can look at it are people who write code for Linux ( the only major GPL kernel out there )

Sorry, but this is a stupid question.

1) By being open-source, users can look at and modify the code on their own. (Most open-source OS users run Linux, so no problem there.)

2) Developers wanting to use the code in other GPL products can do so. (The fact that Linux is the only major GPLed kernel is irrelevant.)

And finally, if you don't like it, you're free to write your own code from scratch. There's tons of proprietary code out there that you're not allowed to look at or modify either, so you're not losing anything other than a free lunch you're not entitled to.

BSD zealots seem to have a serious entitlement mentality to me. If you want to use that license for your own code, that's great; it's yours and you can do what you want with it. But bashing other people for making different decisions for something they own is asinine. How would you feel if someone bashed you because you refuse to loan your personal car or house out to total strangers? It's the same with code. You should be happy that people are making code available to the public at all, not criticizing them for the terms they release it under.

Re:License?

[BrainInAJar]

"(Most open-source OS users run Linux, so no problem there.) "
Most computer users use Windows, so why bother supporting Linux at all?

Fact of the matter is that by GPLing it you're still putting in in the GPL walled garden, which doesn't help anyone other than GPL users. BSD, Solaris, etc are all left out in the cold, meanwhile Linux yanks plenty of code from BSD

Re:License?

[Grishnakh]

Fact of the matter is that by GPLing it you're still putting in in the GPL walled garden, which doesn't help anyone other than GPL users. BSD, Solaris, etc are all left out in the cold, meanwhile Linux yanks plenty of code from BSD

So what? If BSD people don't want that to happen, then they shouldn't release their code under the BSD license. If you don't want to be a GPL user, that's your choice, but that doesn't entitle you to use other peoples' code under terms they don't agree with. If you don't like it, write your own code.

Re:License?

[BrainInAJar]

That's exactly the point... If hardware makers want tto be used by more than just the flavour of the week, they ought to release drivers under a license that everyone can use, rather than just a single kernel

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[CompMD]

I do not believe there is a direct translator for Solidworks to NX. However, an IGES export of an assembly from Solidworks imports to NX very nicely, better than any other program I've seen actually. The assembly structure and part file structure is retained. In other words, if you have a single IGES file of an assembly of 20 parts that you exported from Solidworks, when NX opens the IGES file, it will break out the 20 parts into their part files, and create the assembly file.

As a side note, NX 5 (the current version of NX) was released for XP32, XP64, Linux (x86_64), Solaris (SPARCV9), AIX (POWER), HP-UX (PA-RISC), but NX 6 (due to be released any day now) will only be released for XP32, XP64, and Linux (x86_64). There is a huge move toward standardizing this software on Linux.

Re:Drivers, yes, but let's not kill the applicatio

[dotancohen]

Thanks. While I am glad to know of at least this much interoperability, it most certainly is not enough to work in a Solid shop. Maybe one day...

Re:License?

[Grishnakh]

"Flavour of the week"? Linux has been gaining in popularity for over a decade, while BSD-licensed open-source systems have pretty much fallen by the wayside. Do you honestly think that Linux is suddenly going to lose popularity, and FreeBSD is suddenly going to be a big hit? What are you smoking?

If such a thing ever did happen, I'm sure a lot of people would think about relicensing their code. But the GPL is a much more sensible license all around, as it protects people's code from being used in proprietary places, and happens to be the license used by the most popular open-source OS, so it makes perfect sense that they would stick to that license.