linux hardware developement
 

Over the past week i have installed pink tie /red hat 8.0 . i then f-disked that to do a fresh install for red hat 9.0.
the reason for this is to get a modem to work.. i was under a false pretense that RH 9.0 would reconize my interal pci modem and my ISA sound card .. WRONG . i have download many times and attemped to install the nessary drivers several time but to no avail.But is was not all in vain i am learing a great deal about how software and hardware work together . i will have to goto a linux buddy to get this things up and working. but it should not have to be this way with amount of program developers looking at this type of problem.

i have become the defacto win guy at work . i can usually talk people through their win proplems.

But my concern is with linux and the open source network.
I have kept abreast of all the major articles in the print media of how linux is starting to take over the computer world . It is self evedent that linux will replace windows in the near future. (5 to 10 years if not sooner)
But as long as windows remain the bully on the block the hardware makers are going to make their hardware very user friendly towards windows.

this is wear the linux comunity needs to step to the plate and beat MS and the hardware makers at their game.
what is going on right now in the OS distro's is alot like the beta / vhs war of 1980's. linux will become the standard the world over but if we do not make the programs "user friendly" and hardware compatiable with in the kernel's with out elaborate set protocalls; the the future might become clouded at best.

we as a community need to get the powers to be to develope set standars for the implentation of hardware and software interoperablity with in the kernel it self not just at the DISTRO's level.
if we fail to do this then we are just spinning are wheels .

i know i will get blasted with this and that is fine . i want to be an end-user that can use the full power of the open source OS . i want to see linux beat MS at their own game but we have got to make the OS work across the platform and with minimumal effort to install components; application and games.




:newbie:

Re: linux hardware developement
 

There's one big problem with this analogy... its not the OSS communities fault. The devices aren't being ignored. Its the fact that, well... the companies are ignoring the device driver writers. In order to writing a device driver a kernel geeks needs a certain amount of information on the device. Some companies will give this away for free, some others are cagey as hell, and most... yes most, are open and free about some stuff, and obnoxious about others. And writing a driver without any documentation, black boxing its usually called, is a nightmare. There's aren't too many examples, the best I can think of is:

http://acx100.sourceforge.net

Take Texas Instruments, odds are if you have a laptop, they made the pcmcia bridge, and gave away all the info needed to get a working driver. Ask em about the ACX100 wireless chipset and you'll get ignored.

The world will come around. A couple years ago getting specs out of Sun or HP or Apple was impossible, now they throw them at you. It used to be a bit of a muddle to find a linux supported SCSI card. Nowadays I dare you to find one that doesn't have a driver.

Its all happening from the server down, so the laptop specific goop will be the last to go... maybe PDAs when the OSes start getting more removable.

Also, the ISA card, its just a matter of hand feeding it some driver options. They're still a headache, which is why PCI kit is so well loved :)

What's the sound card?

Also, what's the output of /sbin/lspci

And post back with the info about the modem, or take that info over to www.linmodems.org

Also... if you want to switch distros, skip the RedHats, they're older then dirt now, RH9 was a year and a half ago. Fedora Core 1 is effectively what RH10 would have been, its just a community project now.

Cheers,

Finegan

thank for the response .. i the card is ess es1868 PnP; have sound but no stereo channels . i have downloaded all the intel 536ep modem chipset drivers for rh9 that i could find .. most of the items in the files are very confusing to me and all the comands that i type into a shell get rejected . this is what i am trying to get across .. and standarized format with which to intstall all itmes .

standardized install format... well that's not likely. RPMs only go so far. Every distro has its own packaging format and the argument as to which is best is older then the hills, but really, why be like MS. We just got spoiled over the years. What's the filename for the modem drivers?

And for the soundcard, when you say that you've got sound, you mean it loaded the driver? or that you've got system sound but nothing out of the speakers? Its an sb compliant card, so check /sbin/lsmod and see if "sb" is listed in there along with uart401 and sb_lib and a bunch of dependency modules. If not, post back, if so... open up a Mixer, Gnome: gmix, under KDE... er... can't remember. Kmixer maybe, its under the multimedia section. The channels might be screwed. I'm willing to be the sb module isn't loaded though.

Cheers,

Finegan

Have you tried compiling from source? - it can sometimes be as "straightforward" as

download the tarball
extract it
cd into the directory then

make clean
make 536ep
make install

then reboot and check the modules are loaded with:

lsmod

you should see these :

536ep
536epcore

then put your ISP settings into your dialer.