Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
It's the vendors' fault for not supporting enough hardware (boo Microtek) and for specifying "Linux ready" on the hardware that is supported. There are probably more installations of Linux than Mac OS X (granted, most of those are embedded or servers), yet Mac OS X gets a logo on the box and Linux doesn't.
Oh that is a pain - I wonder why Mac has better support than Linux in this regard, MacOS is BSD based after all - ever tried getting stuff to work on BSD?? Sheesh one would think that it is not such a large leap from MacOS to BSD.
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
Back in the Red Hat Linux 6 days (that's 2000, not RHEL 6 which isn't out yet), I had to download and install a kernel module to let me use the Lucent winmodem in my Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop. This is probably because winmodem drivers are non-free, which in turn is because v.90 is patented. And how does "never" meet your "Internal Intel software modem"?
I also played around with Red Hat 6 back in the day. Don't get me started on that. Thankfully Linux has come a long way since then. Oh and Mandrake Linux - remember the Wizard?
And you got me on the modem - I have never needed to use it, so my "Never needed to" will translate to someone else's "Needed To," there are still downloadable drivers available though.
For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card)
I wasn't making such a distinction. Forward-thinking restaurants and hotels used to provide Ethernet jacks for each patron. Now they have switched from 100BASE-TX to Wi-Fi, just a change in layer 1 without a corresponding change in the layer 2-3 network policy above it.
Okay. It still is less of an issue than is was a few uears ago. And I submit, if a driver can be downloaded, it can be installed from the CD, and hence be included with the hardware. Most CD's have enough space on them to allow for the.deb,.rpm and source together with the dependencies (if any, they can be rolled in with the binary as one "driver" if need be - why this is not done more often is beyond me)
On reading your final comment I realise you might have meant "No enclosed drivers on the CD" as opposed to "No Drivers Available At All"
Correct.
but my counterpoint is that the large majority of hardware out there works out of the box with Linux, and hence needs no drivers.
It depends on which releases of your distribution you follow. A hobbyist has the time to follow Ubuntu from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty, but if you're trying for a stable environment, for example at work, you're probably going from one long-term-supported release to the next, so the hardware support of Hardy out of the box remains relevant for about another year. And often, the official driver enables features that the developers of the free driver don't know how to turn on, such as OpenGL acceleration on some video cards.
There still is a ways to go, but as far as an LTS goes there are improvements coming down the line in the form of updates, and drivers can be downloaded. And if you are at a place of work surely you should have access to at least one company/techie who is worth his salt and can make sure your hardware works with your software?
Fair enough - you raise some good points, I will address them below.
One problem is that for many device the manufacture can not put the driver on a CD and have much hope of it working.
Why? If a binary blob can be downloaded and installed then it can be put on a cd.
Linux refuses to implement a stable binary driver interface. From a companies point of view that is a huge problem.
A cd can hold 700mb of data. Even if a driver is 100mb a CD can hold the.deb,.rpm, source.tgz, Windows XP.exe, Windows Vista.exe and maybe even a Win2k/Mac installer and still have 100mb left for the autorun, pdf reader and other goodies (bloatware) for Windows.
You can not put a driver on a say cd for Linux kernel 2.6 and have it work. Even if you make it FOSS. You could make it a source tar ball and maybe write a script that will compile it BUT then you have to hope that the user has the kernel files installed.
Well what you are referring to is dependency hell. If you are not a Red-Hat fan you will call it RPM hell. Yes that will pose a problem, but most drivers are rather small, and a lot of the dependencies are included in the binary blob.
Ah but you say that you can just release the specs and driver will show up.
Uh. I never said that, and it is not completely true - but if you release the specs chances are that if not the community, then some larger vendor will write the drivers.
Well maybe but most complex FOSS drivers are written by the companies that produce the hardware and not by the community. They often help but the majority of the work is done by the vendor.
While that is true, the community sometimes provides better drivers than the vendor - a good example is the vendor supplied fgrlx drivers for ATI cards as opposed to the open-source alternative.
Next you have support issues. How do you know if the device is failing and not the driver?
The same is true for Windows. I am in support, and let me tell you, one of the things you do is download the newest driver from the vendor's website. Why is it OK do do this for Windows and not for Linux?
Then you have timing issues. You have a supper cool new graphics card and you want Linux users to have chance to use it. Well the new driver has made it into the the distros kernels yet.... So what do you do?
You provide the drivers! How does a vendor release a brand-new graphics card without a driver in the first place? Nvidia supplies the drivers on their disk so this is a non-point as far as I am concerned.
And are the problems if you can FOSS the driver. If your driver uses software that you can not release because you bought it then can not do a FOSS driver.
Look, I am not a fan of those who insist that any driver that is used in concert with FOSS software needs to be open-sourced. If NVIDIA wants to keep their driver proprietary it is OK with me as long as the darned thing works. Why insist on FOSS if it works? I know that there are philosophical and practical reasons for open-sourcing software and drivers, but there has to be some give with the take.
You may have to spend a lot of money to write around the code and test it. Then you are right back to the same problems.
Well I pay good money for the hardware, I expect the vendor to provide me with the tools to use it. I am convinced that they make enough money off off the hardware to justify some extra effort with the software.
The reasons for a lack of a stable driver interface are IMHO contrived at best. Yes you may loose a tiny bit of speed. Security? Not if you design the interface well. Locked into Cruft? Yes that is an issue but nobody says you must keep the interface f
Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?
It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.
I agree. But the problem is not as large as you seem to make it out to be. Won't you agree that it is constantly becoming less of a problem?
My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.
It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.
I struggle to understand exactly what you are getting at here. Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
While it is wrong for people to place the blame elsewhere (i.e. at Linux's door) it is a symptom of the way Operating Systems are perceived. Windows = Right, Linux = Not Right.
So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available
So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card) I have needed to get the broadcom driver from the repo, and once I got alerted that my internal wintel modem had a proprietary driver available.
For my USB LG WIFI card I could install with NdisWrapper the driver that is available on the CD, though the NdisWrapper was not always available in a clean install. With Ubuntu I needed to downloaded NdisWrapper, with Mint and Mandrive I had a NdisWrapper driver available.
Using my phone as a GPRS modem (Nokia) I came right with KDE based environments without Internet Access because KPPP supported it without the need to download anything.
Lately with UBUNTU 3g cards work out of the box, no drivers needed.
Previously I did one of two things - took my laptop to an internet cafe to download and install everything I needed driver wise via LAN (this was usually limited to a broadcom WIFI driver, and once to KPPP for Ubuntu) or I got the repo's on DVD from a local LUG for free and installed everything I needed from there.
Shipit, from Canonical, also provides the base install for free via e-mail. It is a pain though that Ubuntu does not have mainstream codec support by default though.
Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver
But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.
"Vast Majority Of Hardware" is a very strong statement. You will have to support it because I can count the unsupported hardware that I needed (or need) to download hardware for on one had.
1. Broadcom Wifi Card. 2. Wacom Tablet (now supported out of the box with Karmic Koala) 3. Nvidia Proprietary drivers. 4. My Microdia Webcam - works fine BTW. 5. Internal Intel software modem.
Honorable mention: Ndiswrapper (not technically a driver - but I'll add it here in any case since it enables the using of the hardware driver) (also not true with all distributions)
And hardware that completely fails to work with Linux.
Lexmark Printers - Some have claimed to have gotten these to work properly. My one friend has a music centre (amplifier, auto drum set, sound board) that he had to fiddle around with to work - no official support. He is a musician and us
Okay, so one scanner does not work, an old scanner. Show me hardware from pre XP days and I can find examples in that group that do not work under XP.
Also you conveniently forget the driver nightmare that was (and still is!) windows Vista.
Lexmark is an example of bad hardware support by a vendor for Linux.
Now the obvious question: How is this linux's fault?
But that is the attitude out there isn't it? My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.
And I have had to download drivers for Windows machines when the enclosed CD provided drivers do not work. Examples are (just from this year): A sharp network printer/copier. HP Printers, especially older ones when a client needs to re-install. Motherboard drivers when a service pack upgrade neccesitated new drivers.
ANd the need to download and install a service pack when a piece of hardware was added post SP upgrade and the PC needed a format/reinstall due to Windows going bork for whatever reason - here's looking at you Linksys PCI-WIFI card.
So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available ("broadband here is classified as anything faster than 128kb/s and normally ranges in 1gb caps [limits] and up - uncapped broadband is speed limited to 1Mb/s) and the only drivers I regularly need to download are Nvidia binary drivers, and my brothers Geforce 6x series card has a linux driver on the CD! (this was his old card, he now has a newer one - 8800 something and I run a 6500 but only because I am no gamer - enjoy scripting and so on more than fragging.)
Seriously - be fair when criticizing. Like my OP said - BOTH operating systems require some tinkering to get to work on SOME hardware.
And I have personally seen more hardware renegated to the trash bin in our company due to Vista than to any of the guys running Linux - most recently my boss needing to buy a new business card scanner because his previous one (only about 18months old) is not Vista supported, he needed to get a newer HP printer, and the rest of the office still (thankfully) run XP and Linux because upgrading the Windows users to Vista would mean us replacing severral not so old HP printers - like the 1080 that our accounts lady is using.
Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver, but in the real world the scenario is often quite different.
although did hard reset a few times and using vanilla WM for a while.
There is a clue right there.
This is a view I find among Windows users a lot. (I support Windows for a living, servers and Desktops - XP, Vista and even the odd Win2k box and the other day I actually came across an office PC running Win98SE - eek)
The view is this - "Windows is not broken - it runs fine after installing all this, and doing that, and tweaking this, oh and don't forget the Firewall and Antivirus... look, no more crashes!"
The moment Linux comes up in the conversation (they usually ask after watching me troubleshoot the network from my laptop - Ubuntu, or whatever takes my fancy) they have this idea that it takes a lot of tinkering to get it to run properly.
From personal experience I have found a modern Linux distro takes about the same effort to get running to a users liking as would a typical Windows install. The effort is usually expended in different areas over the lifetime of the install as opposed to Windows - but it takes some effort both ways.
On some hardware I might need drivers for Windows or Linux, on others no drivers needed for either. What seems a common theme with Windows installs are general slowing down over the life of the install, random Virus issues that needs to have an eye kept on it, MS updates that break stuff.
With Linux I find that the slowing down over time is not as obvious, if at all, and update related breakages are less common.
But Windows Users will happily spend hours to tinker with a Windows box, but the moment a Linux install needs some effort they throw their hands in the air and yell "This will never be ready!"
I read a book on ultra marathons and the people who run them. Apparently humans are uniquely adapted to running/walking long distances.
Ultramarathon runners keep up an average pace comparable to what postal ponies in the US did years ago.
In fact, Nigerian runners keep up a pace better than most migrating African antelope.
The only animal that can reliably outdistance an average human is the Husky - and then only in favorably cold conditions - they tend to overheat otherwise.
Most animals can outspeed a human, but endurance is our thing - like you said our cooling system is very efficient. Also our stride length compared to body weight is very good.
And the sweet irony here is that farther down the article where they mention Bluetooth they use an Ubuntu screenshot to demonstrate a bluetooth file transfer.
Read my post again - everything I need is in OO. Everything you need is not.
Welcome to the world of free software - you get to choose.
And why should you be modded down or flamed? You make valid points - for some things OO doesn't cut it, that is true, but for everything I (and everybody I know who uses it) need OO cuts it very well.
Btw if you do not need MSAccess you can run Office very well on that Ubuntu PC of yours if you have Crossover for Linux (I prefer it to WINE.)
Have a nice day, and here's to you plunking that Windows install very soon!
I just had the thought that after reading my above reply one of two things will happen:
Someone will buy quintin.co.za from google and direct it to a porn site and really screw up my reputation, OR someone will do a whois lookup on the domain and mess with my personal information.
While you make good points, and kinda demonstrate my point of the legal mindset not having caught up with the technology your last sentence I disagree with.
These are not pure Advertisements, but Adwords - it is a keyword driven advertising system, and you buy the keyword and that paid-for keyword becomes the Adword.
Do you see the fine distinction?
That brings me to the point I made about receiving revenue from the adwords. My name is Quintin, I own quintin.co.za. Say this was my business name and also my trademark, what now if a rival business bought "quintin" as an adword from google, and used this adword to essentially drive searches for my business to his business?
Shouldn't I be given the option of selling the trademark that I paid money to register? If Google can rake in cash from someone for selling quintin.co.za as an adword should I not also receive something from the deal? Or have an option of blocking that sale?
I have the idea that this is in essence what happened to the lady referenced in the story, and I hope that a better solution is found than the current one.
I read all these analogies on what it is that Google did and here is my take:
For the purpose of this analogy imagine Google owns a telephone directory where your number gets listed for free for your business, but there is also a "Yellow Pages" section, where you can pay to have your business listed with number and some info - now imagine you only have your number listed in the free section, and a competitor of yours bought an add, put YOUR company name in it with THEIR number.
Google adwords is so powerful that it is in essence putting another IP address behind your company/domain name.
And in fact: Google "did" nothing - they offer a product that some competitor of this company has found a way to abuse.
That they allow such practices bears study though - I am unsure if the laws of the world has caught up with this business model though.
I would suggest that they notify the owner of the trademark name that someone is interested in buying an adword for that name, and to decide not to allow it, or maybe even get some of the addwords cash - it is their trademark after all. They could in essence cause the addword to be too expensive for the competitor to buy...
This is in fact similar to someone selling your personal details, google is selling other trademarks... hmm...
Our Company webserver and mailservers serve as DNS servers as well.
There are four in total. We are an ISP, but we are dependant on a larger backbone - so we registered our own DNS servers.
Also, DHCP on the lan with your own DNS server on LAN side should be fine, and you can also edit the hosts file if all else fails. We have a few (Vista) laptops where we needed to hardconfig LAN side server addresses in the hosts file - but I suspect this has less to do with nxdomain problems than with a larger config issue between Win2003serv and Vista.
If you can script it should be fairly easy. Here is how I would do it (we run mostly gentoo servers and a mixture of windows, Ubuntu (and Ubuntu based) and RPM distros, but the guys using Linux customise so heavily and is tech savvy enough to keep themselves up to date.)
Set up sshd on every desktop, with key authorization (we do this with the gentoo servers.)
With a script and cron job you should be able to push them to run updates regularly. But you can just use the normal update tools and a local repo that is on a server on the lan to keep the packages updated.
Canonical also has a tool to do Ubuntu boxen over a network... cannot remember it's name though.
Any slashdotters happen to remember the name of the utility?
I am also wondering about this - "LET them have access..." is probably a bit crude, since no one really controls the whole intarwebs and nobody could decide who gets it and who doesn't... legally, but surely the peering links can be removed via a "dropped anchor" or "fishing accident?"
I as because I am using an old dell laptop (work machine - techs seem to be bottom of the pile for now hardware) and although I have 3accell it is mesa accelerated and I could not find the correct drivers for it.
The card is an ATI Radeon Mobility with 32mb ram. I wont be using Compiz but I'd like some decent performance out of it.
Also of note, the ballute was ahead of the spacecraft, instead of behind it. It should have been behind the spacecraft, the way it unfolded in front indicated a non rigid structure that should have been pushed back towards the spacecraft by the pressure of the atmosphere.
Firefox for Windows has an "IE Tab" extension. Give it a whirl and see how it renders your companies intarweb pages - maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. At least if it does you can use it to score some points with the boss by allowing the company to upgrade to a safe and modern browser with productivity addons that is free!
Anybody have any idea if the IE Tab extension is available for FF3 yet? And for Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
It's the vendors' fault for not supporting enough hardware (boo Microtek) and for specifying "Linux ready" on the hardware that is supported. There are probably more installations of Linux than Mac OS X (granted, most of those are embedded or servers), yet Mac OS X gets a logo on the box and Linux doesn't.
Oh that is a pain - I wonder why Mac has better support than Linux in this regard, MacOS is BSD based after all - ever tried getting stuff to work on BSD?? Sheesh one would think that it is not such a large leap from MacOS to BSD.
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
Back in the Red Hat Linux 6 days (that's 2000, not RHEL 6 which isn't out yet), I had to download and install a kernel module to let me use the Lucent winmodem in my Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop. This is probably because winmodem drivers are non-free, which in turn is because v.90 is patented. And how does "never" meet your "Internal Intel software modem"?
I also played around with Red Hat 6 back in the day. Don't get me started on that. Thankfully Linux has come a long way since then. Oh and Mandrake Linux - remember the Wizard?
And you got me on the modem - I have never needed to use it, so my "Never needed to" will translate to someone else's "Needed To," there are still downloadable drivers available though.
For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card)
I wasn't making such a distinction. Forward-thinking restaurants and hotels used to provide Ethernet jacks for each patron. Now they have switched from 100BASE-TX to Wi-Fi, just a change in layer 1 without a corresponding change in the layer 2-3 network policy above it.
Okay. It still is less of an issue than is was a few uears ago. And I submit, if a driver can be downloaded, it can be installed from the CD, and hence be included with the hardware. Most CD's have enough space on them to allow for the .deb, .rpm and source together with the dependencies (if any, they can be rolled in with the binary as one "driver" if need be - why this is not done more often is beyond me)
On reading your final comment I realise you might have meant "No enclosed drivers on the CD" as opposed to "No Drivers Available At All"
Correct.
but my counterpoint is that the large majority of hardware out there works out of the box with Linux, and hence needs no drivers.
It depends on which releases of your distribution you follow. A hobbyist has the time to follow Ubuntu from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty, but if you're trying for a stable environment, for example at work, you're probably going from one long-term-supported release to the next, so the hardware support of Hardy out of the box remains relevant for about another year. And often, the official driver enables features that the developers of the free driver don't know how to turn on, such as OpenGL acceleration on some video cards.
There still is a ways to go, but as far as an LTS goes there are improvements coming down the line in the form of updates, and drivers can be downloaded. And if you are at a place of work surely you should have access to at least one company/techie who is worth his salt and can make sure your hardware works with your software?
Fair enough - you raise some good points, I will address them below.
One problem is that for many device the manufacture can not put the driver on a CD and have much hope of it working.
Why? If a binary blob can be downloaded and installed then it can be put on a cd.
Linux refuses to implement a stable binary driver interface. From a companies point of view that is a huge problem.
A cd can hold 700mb of data. Even if a driver is 100mb a CD can hold the .deb, .rpm, source.tgz, Windows XP .exe, Windows Vista .exe and maybe even a Win2k/Mac installer and still have 100mb left for the autorun, pdf reader and other goodies (bloatware) for Windows.
You can not put a driver on a say cd for Linux kernel 2.6 and have it work. Even if you make it FOSS. You could make it a source tar ball and maybe write a script that will compile it BUT then you have to hope that the user has the kernel files installed.
Well what you are referring to is dependency hell. If you are not a Red-Hat fan you will call it RPM hell. Yes that will pose a problem, but most drivers are rather small, and a lot of the dependencies are included in the binary blob.
Ah but you say that you can just release the specs and driver will show up.
Uh. I never said that, and it is not completely true - but if you release the specs chances are that if not the community, then some larger vendor will write the drivers.
Well maybe but most complex FOSS drivers are written by the companies that produce the hardware and not by the community. They often help but the majority of the work is done by the vendor.
While that is true, the community sometimes provides better drivers than the vendor - a good example is the vendor supplied fgrlx drivers for ATI cards as opposed to the open-source alternative.
Next you have support issues. How do you know if the device is failing and not the driver?
The same is true for Windows. I am in support, and let me tell you, one of the things you do is download the newest driver from the vendor's website. Why is it OK do do this for Windows and not for Linux?
Then you have timing issues. You have a supper cool new graphics card and you want Linux users to have chance to use it. Well the new driver has made it into the the distros kernels yet.... So what do you do?
You provide the drivers! How does a vendor release a brand-new graphics card without a driver in the first place? Nvidia supplies the drivers on their disk so this is a non-point as far as I am concerned.
And are the problems if you can FOSS the driver.
If your driver uses software that you can not release because you bought it then can not do a FOSS driver.
Look, I am not a fan of those who insist that any driver that is used in concert with FOSS software needs to be open-sourced. If NVIDIA wants to keep their driver proprietary it is OK with me as long as the darned thing works. Why insist on FOSS if it works? I know that there are philosophical and practical reasons for open-sourcing software and drivers, but there has to be some give with the take.
You may have to spend a lot of money to write around the code and test it. Then you are right back to the same problems.
Well I pay good money for the hardware, I expect the vendor to provide me with the tools to use it. I am convinced that they make enough money off off the hardware to justify some extra effort with the software.
The reasons for a lack of a stable driver interface are IMHO contrived at best. Yes you may loose a tiny bit of speed. Security? Not if you design the interface well. Locked into Cruft? Yes that is an issue but nobody says you must keep the interface f
Now the obvious question: How is [manufacturers' failure to cooperate] linux's fault?
It is not Linux's fault, but it is still Linux's problem.
I agree. But the problem is not as large as you seem to make it out to be. Won't you agree that it is constantly becoming less of a problem?
My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.
It's the vendors' fault for not putting a penguin logo on any products that I can buy at Best Buy. But because it's equally the fault of every vendor, end users place the blame elsewhere.
I struggle to understand exactly what you are getting at here. Do you mean that it is the vendors fault for not specifying "not linux ready" if the hardware is not Linux supported, or are you saying it is the vendors fault for not providing drivers and then specifying "linux Ready?"
While it is wrong for people to place the blame elsewhere (i.e. at Linux's door) it is a symptom of the way Operating Systems are perceived. Windows = Right, Linux = Not Right.
So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available
So how do you use the Internet to download the driver for your modem or network card?
I have never needed to download a driver for a modem or network card in Linux.
For WIFI (and I make here a distinction between WIFI card and NETWORK card) I have needed to get the broadcom driver from the repo, and once I got alerted that my internal wintel modem had a proprietary driver available.
For my USB LG WIFI card I could install with NdisWrapper the driver that is available on the CD, though the NdisWrapper was not always available in a clean install. With Ubuntu I needed to downloaded NdisWrapper, with Mint and Mandrive I had a NdisWrapper driver available.
Using my phone as a GPRS modem (Nokia) I came right with KDE based environments without Internet Access because KPPP supported it without the need to download anything.
Lately with UBUNTU 3g cards work out of the box, no drivers needed.
Previously I did one of two things - took my laptop to an internet cafe to download and install everything I needed driver wise via LAN (this was usually limited to a broadcom WIFI driver, and once to KPPP for Ubuntu) or I got the repo's on DVD from a local LUG for free and installed everything I needed from there.
Shipit, from Canonical, also provides the base install for free via e-mail. It is a pain though that Ubuntu does not have mainstream codec support by default though.
Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver
But "almost" is still better than no driver being enclosed at all, which is the case for the vast majority of hardware that one would want to use on Linux.
"Vast Majority Of Hardware" is a very strong statement. You will have to support it because I can count the unsupported hardware that I needed (or need) to download hardware for on one had.
1. Broadcom Wifi Card.
2. Wacom Tablet (now supported out of the box with Karmic Koala)
3. Nvidia Proprietary drivers.
4. My Microdia Webcam - works fine BTW.
5. Internal Intel software modem.
Honorable mention: Ndiswrapper (not technically a driver - but I'll add it here in any case since it enables the using of the hardware driver) (also not true with all distributions)
And hardware that completely fails to work with Linux.
Lexmark Printers - Some have claimed to have gotten these to work properly.
My one friend has a music centre (amplifier, auto drum set, sound board) that he had to fiddle around with to work - no official support. He is a musician and us
Okay, so one scanner does not work, an old scanner. Show me hardware from pre XP days and I can find examples in that group that do not work under XP.
Also you conveniently forget the driver nightmare that was (and still is!) windows Vista.
Lexmark is an example of bad hardware support by a vendor for Linux.
Now the obvious question: How is this linux's fault?
But that is the attitude out there isn't it? My hardware is not supported on my operating system hence it is my operating systems fault, unless of course I am running Windows - in that case it is the vendor's fault.
And I have had to download drivers for Windows machines when the enclosed CD provided drivers do not work. Examples are (just from this year): A sharp network printer/copier. HP Printers, especially older ones when a client needs to re-install. Motherboard drivers when a service pack upgrade neccesitated new drivers.
ANd the need to download and install a service pack when a piece of hardware was added post SP upgrade and the PC needed a format/reinstall due to Windows going bork for whatever reason - here's looking at you Linksys PCI-WIFI card.
So what if Linux drivers do not come on CD's? I live in South Africa where broadband is only just becomeing readily available ("broadband here is classified as anything faster than 128kb/s and normally ranges in 1gb caps [limits] and up - uncapped broadband is speed limited to 1Mb/s) and the only drivers I regularly need to download are Nvidia binary drivers, and my brothers Geforce 6x series card has a linux driver on the CD! (this was his old card, he now has a newer one - 8800 something and I run a 6500 but only because I am no gamer - enjoy scripting and so on more than fragging.)
Seriously - be fair when criticizing. Like my OP said - BOTH operating systems require some tinkering to get to work on SOME hardware.
And I have personally seen more hardware renegated to the trash bin in our company due to Vista than to any of the guys running Linux - most recently my boss needing to buy a new business card scanner because his previous one (only about 18months old) is not Vista supported, he needed to get a newer HP printer, and the rest of the office still (thankfully) run XP and Linux because upgrading the Windows users to Vista would mean us replacing severral not so old HP printers - like the 1080 that our accounts lady is using.
Like you said - Windows almost guarantees that you can use the enclosed driver, but in the real world the scenario is often quite different.
how WM is broken out of the box?
although did hard reset a few times and using vanilla WM for a while.
There is a clue right there.
This is a view I find among Windows users a lot. (I support Windows for a living, servers and Desktops - XP, Vista and even the odd Win2k box and the other day I actually came across an office PC running Win98SE - eek)
The view is this - "Windows is not broken - it runs fine after installing all this, and doing that, and tweaking this, oh and don't forget the Firewall and Antivirus... look, no more crashes!"
The moment Linux comes up in the conversation (they usually ask after watching me troubleshoot the network from my laptop - Ubuntu, or whatever takes my fancy) they have this idea that it takes a lot of tinkering to get it to run properly.
From personal experience I have found a modern Linux distro takes about the same effort to get running to a users liking as would a typical Windows install. The effort is usually expended in different areas over the lifetime of the install as opposed to Windows - but it takes some effort both ways.
On some hardware I might need drivers for Windows or Linux, on others no drivers needed for either. What seems a common theme with Windows installs are general slowing down over the life of the install, random Virus issues that needs to have an eye kept on it, MS updates that break stuff.
With Linux I find that the slowing down over time is not as obvious, if at all, and update related breakages are less common.
But Windows Users will happily spend hours to tinker with a Windows box, but the moment a Linux install needs some effort they throw their hands in the air and yell "This will never be ready!"
I read a book on ultra marathons and the people who run them. Apparently humans are uniquely adapted to running/walking long distances.
Ultramarathon runners keep up an average pace comparable to what postal ponies in the US did years ago.
In fact, Nigerian runners keep up a pace better than most migrating African antelope.
The only animal that can reliably outdistance an average human is the Husky - and then only in favorably cold conditions - they tend to overheat otherwise.
Most animals can outspeed a human, but endurance is our thing - like you said our cooling system is very efficient. Also our stride length compared to body weight is very good.
And the sweet irony here is that farther down the article where they mention Bluetooth they use an Ubuntu screenshot to demonstrate a bluetooth file transfer.
Read my post again - everything I need is in OO. Everything you need is not.
Welcome to the world of free software - you get to choose.
And why should you be modded down or flamed? You make valid points - for some things OO doesn't cut it, that is true, but for everything I (and everybody I know who uses it) need OO cuts it very well.
Btw if you do not need MSAccess you can run Office very well on that Ubuntu PC of yours if you have Crossover for Linux (I prefer it to WINE.)
Have a nice day, and here's to you plunking that Windows install very soon!
Unless you are a gamer - the "other" geek ;)
No Thanks.
I have everything I need in OpenOffice, and it is better priced too...
I read something negative about Microsoft in the summary and decided to jump in with an uninformed jibe of my own.
M$ is Teh Suxorz!
In the case of the featured story (the summary) it would seem that the person who bought the adword was in a competing business.
That kinda eliminates your argument - but you are right, that angle seems to have been overlooked here.
(bad form I know BUT)
I just had the thought that after reading my above reply one of two things will happen:
Someone will buy quintin.co.za from google and direct it to a porn site and really screw up my reputation, OR someone will do a whois lookup on the domain and mess with my personal information.
Sigh - THINK before you post!
While you make good points, and kinda demonstrate my point of the legal mindset not having caught up with the technology your last sentence I disagree with.
These are not pure Advertisements, but Adwords - it is a keyword driven advertising system, and you buy the keyword and that paid-for keyword becomes the Adword.
Do you see the fine distinction?
That brings me to the point I made about receiving revenue from the adwords. My name is Quintin, I own quintin.co.za. Say this was my business name and also my trademark, what now if a rival business bought "quintin" as an adword from google, and used this adword to essentially drive searches for my business to his business?
Shouldn't I be given the option of selling the trademark that I paid money to register? If Google can rake in cash from someone for selling quintin.co.za as an adword should I not also receive something from the deal? Or have an option of blocking that sale?
I have the idea that this is in essence what happened to the lady referenced in the story, and I hope that a better solution is found than the current one.
I read all these analogies on what it is that Google did and here is my take:
For the purpose of this analogy imagine Google owns a telephone directory where your number gets listed for free for your business, but there is also a "Yellow Pages" section, where you can pay to have your business listed with number and some info - now imagine you only have your number listed in the free section, and a competitor of yours bought an add, put YOUR company name in it with THEIR number.
Google adwords is so powerful that it is in essence putting another IP address behind your company/domain name.
And in fact: Google "did" nothing - they offer a product that some competitor of this company has found a way to abuse.
That they allow such practices bears study though - I am unsure if the laws of the world has caught up with this business model though.
I would suggest that they notify the owner of the trademark name that someone is interested in buying an adword for that name, and to decide not to allow it, or maybe even get some of the addwords cash - it is their trademark after all. They could in essence cause the addword to be too expensive for the competitor to buy...
This is in fact similar to someone selling your personal details, google is selling other trademarks... hmm...
Our Company webserver and mailservers serve as DNS servers as well.
There are four in total. We are an ISP, but we are dependant on a larger backbone - so we registered our own DNS servers.
Also, DHCP on the lan with your own DNS server on LAN side should be fine, and you can also edit the hosts file if all else fails. We have a few (Vista) laptops where we needed to hardconfig LAN side server addresses in the hosts file - but I suspect this has less to do with nxdomain problems than with a larger config issue between Win2003serv and Vista.
If you can script it should be fairly easy. Here is how I would do it (we run mostly gentoo servers and a mixture of windows, Ubuntu (and Ubuntu based) and RPM distros, but the guys using Linux customise so heavily and is tech savvy enough to keep themselves up to date.)
Set up sshd on every desktop, with key authorization (we do this with the gentoo servers.)
With a script and cron job you should be able to push them to run updates regularly. But you can just use the normal update tools and a local repo that is on a server on the lan to keep the packages updated.
Canonical also has a tool to do Ubuntu boxen over a network... cannot remember it's name though.
Any slashdotters happen to remember the name of the utility?
So as opposed to a "Weapon of Mass Distruction" the chinese hacker force is a "Weapon of Mass Dysfunction"
When do the yanks invade?
>sorry could not resist...
I am also wondering about this - "LET them have access..." is probably a bit crude, since no one really controls the whole intarwebs and nobody could decide who gets it and who doesn't... legally, but surely the peering links can be removed via a "dropped anchor" or "fishing accident?"
Which old ATI card?
I as because I am using an old dell laptop (work machine - techs seem to be bottom of the pile for now hardware) and although I have 3accell it is mesa accelerated and I could not find the correct drivers for it.
The card is an ATI Radeon Mobility with 32mb ram. I wont be using Compiz but I'd like some decent performance out of it.
Any ideas?
Steve? Is that you?
Also of note, the ballute was ahead of the spacecraft, instead of behind it. It should have been behind the spacecraft, the way it unfolded in front indicated a non rigid structure that should have been pushed back towards the spacecraft by the pressure of the atmosphere.
I tried installing it with crossover and no dice. Will keep trying though, but I do suspect that I won't get it right...
Come on over to the Dark Side... complete your migration young padawan - we have sudo.
Hey... have I spoken to you today? I work in tech support...
Firefox for Windows has an "IE Tab" extension. Give it a whirl and see how it renders your companies intarweb pages - maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. At least if it does you can use it to score some points with the boss by allowing the company to upgrade to a safe and modern browser with productivity addons that is free!
Anybody have any idea if the IE Tab extension is available for FF3 yet? And for Linux?