[Sussex] RE. web stats

[Alfredo Vogel]

> What would be most useful would be the hardware manufacturer to provide
> instructions and/or drivers for linux so that you can use their products
> more effectively. Its not too hard for the suppliers to do a bit of
> homework and see if there are drivers for linux for that piece of
> hardware, and advertise appropriately.

The hardware companies seem to be very reluctant to write drivers if 
they do not have a 'safe selling' agent like windowns which 
automatically guarantees millions of sales to the hardware supplier by 
just saying '... micropop compatible hardware ...' on the box.
My speedtouch said '... works under Mac, Win and linux ...' only win 
driver was supplied and the alcatel co uk then linked the driver for 
linux with sourceforge saying 'an approved linux driver is now available 
...' The user (newbie) then goes and downloads and spends anything from 
a day to a week tweaking and .... alas! learning a lot about kernels, 
make make install and other commands (and GUI)... I am now fairly good 
at bash and terminals and drink lots of coffee while the linux bos is 
filling the terminal with weird looking messages one cannot read and 
doesn't understand ...


The p2p idea seems interesting but even if all security issues are OK, 
the combinations of hardware of each patched kernel must surely be 
almost infinite and it will always have redundant or wrong patches for 
others. I think the way forward is just p2p the kernel modules and each 
user to try it out ... very much as it is today via the internet and the 
*nix community?