[wellylug] DSE & Linux

[Vincent Cox]

>I bought a Terminator PC for my grandmother. I blew away Mandrake and
>installed Debian (because it's what I'm familiar with), and went through
>some hassle getting the Intel HaM modem (mentioned in another thread) going
>with a custom kernel. That was survivable, though someone with less
>knowledge than me would no doubt have had problems, and possibly given
>up (as I was tempted to do). However, it appears that this modem won't
>work at all with kernel 2.6. That's the sort of thing I was trying to
>get away from when I decided to forget about Windows.
>  
>

I dont think it matters what operating system you choose these days,  
you're never going to get away from these
sorts of problems.

>The other thing I bought was their PCI 802.11b card - again with the
>penguin on the box. It turns out to have binary modules as well. After
>struggling to get in working in Debian, I downloaded and installed
>Redhat 9.2 (from memory) - the latest version mentioned in the docs on
>the CD. Even then, I couldn't get it going - though of course I'm not
>that familiar with RedHat. Again, even If I was able to make it work (as
>people obviously have), I think I'd be out of luck with a newer kernel.
>
>To me, labelling such hardware as 'Linux compatible' is bogus.
>  
>

I agree, putting the penguin on the box can be a form of false 
advertising.  I bought a Flyvideo 3000 Video capture/tv card which had
a penguin on the box, it came with a disc with some kernel modules on 
it.  No instructions on how to patch a kernel, and despite all my 
efforts I could not
get it going under 2.4 series kernel.  Luckily for me it's supported out 
of the box with 2.6 kernels.

>At the very least, I'd like to see fully open source drivers,
>preferably with assistance from the hardware manufacturer (rather than
>relying on reverse engineering); much better is to pick the hardware for
>which the drivers are in the standard kernel tree. That way, I'm pretty
>much guaranteed that I can get it going in any distro with any kernel,
>now or in the future. Obviously that's not practical for brand new
>leading edge stuff; I'm guessing most drivers don't get written before
>the hardware is released the way they are for Windows (though that'd be
>nice).
>  
>