Re: Automatic download and installation of drivers.

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

The _full_ quote of that last paragraph contains the disproof to
your claim about timeliness and competitiveness ... 

> With a patch, "knowledgeable" users can get going right away.  All
> others are going to need to wait for a new release in any case, or
> will ask their "knowledgeable user" friends for help.

It's well known that even in the Windows world, most support
comes from friendly local experts ("power users").  Those are
the folk that get called in when a vendor's driver disk doesn't
install correctly (the ones I get usually don't).

So far as I know, there isn't even an authoritative list of all
the USB and CardBus devices supported by, say, the 2.4.12
kernel.  Or even a good way to extract the subset of that list
that's packaged as the MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE entries,
short of building a kernel with every driver configured as a
module (a bit painful IMO).

- Dave


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Jansen" <tim@tjansen.de>
To: "David Brownell" <david-b@pacbell.net>; <linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 11:47 AM
Subject: Re: Automatic download and installation of drivers.


> On Wednesday 17 October 2001 04:01, David Brownell wrote:
> > Easy fix:  provide a patch to the kernel source, rather than going with
> > a binary distribution model.  The model of binary driver distributions
> > is a problem. 
> > With a patch, "knowledgeable" users can get going right away.  All
> > others are going to need to wait for a new release in any case
> 
> But this means, in other words, that Linux is not competitive in this area. 
> Then regular users have to wait up to 6 months before they can use new 
> devices because they have to wait for the next Red Hat distribution while Mac 
> and Windows users can already use the device. It would also force them to 
> update a stable system only for getting a new device driver.
> And it would result in hardware manufactures being unable to sell their new 
> devices to the majority of Linux users before most distributions have been 
> updated.
> 
> bye...
> 
> 
> 



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