Has Ubuntu Replaced Windows on Your Box?

[Michael T. Richter]

On Fri, 2006-28-04 at 21:23 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> Don Dwiggins wrote:
> > - Printing: I have an HP Officejet T45;
> 
> Please contact HP and tell them to support Linux.


That's a naive response.

When I was doing device drivers for a line of telephony cards (we need
the wayback machine for this) we got the occasional call for writing a
Linux driver.  Each time we got such a call, the company's president
came rushing to me to ask if it could be done.  I'd fire up the research
tools (this predated the widely-available WWW) and start investigating.
Each time, after the research was complete, the decision was made by the
same president who was so eager to get it that it wasn't worth the time.

The issue, you see, is "which distribution?"  The sheer bewildering
variety of kernel, libc, gcc, etc. versions out there makes it basically
impossible to make a driver that works with more than a handful of
distros at a time.  Back then it was even worse -- each distro was
basically unique.  Nowadays you have more distro families, so you could
pick a family and support it and get reasonable coverage.  But even
there it's not worth the effort.  For a very small minority of end-users
you have a very large expansion of headache and development cost.

I see now from the company's web page that they support Linux.  In a way
that would be off-putting to Linux developers.  You basically have to
tell them which platform and version you want to use and if they don't
already support it you pay their development costs to produce a version
for that platform.  http://www.pikatechnologies.com/products/linux.htm

--
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter at gmail.com, mtr1966 at hotpop.com
MSN: ttmrichter at hotmail.com, mtr1966 at hotmail.com; YIM:
michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber:
mtr1966 at jabber.cn

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery." --Abraham Lincoln
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