Re: Automatic download and installation of drivers.

[Tim Jansen <tim@tjansen.de>]

On Wednesday 17 October 2001 21:24, David Brownell wrote:
> > 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).

But this is one of the problems with Linux and newbies - even with today's 
distributions there are far too many things you need "knowledgable" users 
for. This is definitely not the way it should be, and Windows shows that it 
is not neccessary. While it is true that it the driver installation fails 
sometimes you can be sure that this will improve over the next years. 
Actually the frequent failures of driver installations are probably the main 
reasons that Microsoft started their driver certification program.


> 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. 

You wouldn't need this in the kernel for automatic downloads. Actually the 
idea of automatic downloadable drivers is to provide drivers that are NOT in 
the kernel. If the user connects a new device and the system doesn't find a 
driver for it it would request one from some server. This server could either 
provide a driver itself, based the device's vendor and model id, or forward 
the system to the vendor's server which would then try to find one for the 
model.

bye...



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