On Wednesday 25 May 2005 09:30, Pankaj Dekate wrote:

This is the first time I am hearing that a hardware is developed for a particular OS.

To put it more accurately there is hardware developed keeping a particular os in mind eg. TRON and in the distant past Transputer, Acorn Archimedes and 6809 which fitted the stack based FORTH language and a FORTH os. But nothing prevents other os from being ported to these archs. In the case of pc compatbile hardware there is nothing os specific. It's just that the drivers are not available for non p rop os.

Man if these hardware vendor also provide a driver for their device ,then this problem wouldn't arise.It is the hackers who write these drivers either by extending some driver written for some similar device.

Again it's the spec that is more important rather than the driver per se. FLOSS software proliferates in more ways than one can imagine. Having a closed driver blocks filing of niches and is a maintanence nightmare. The life of a closed driver will be at best 2 yrs, before it becomes unusable, taking down a perfectly good piece of hardware with it. In another thread we are on a nostalgia spree. I have a old 486 that cant use a new drive because of the bios. If the bios source was available it could have been easily hacked to use a newer drive.

I didn't have my sound card supported for several years just because the h/w co didn't want to release their specs.But those idiots didn't provide the drivers also. Once the specs came up some one came up with a driver for it and my device is working fine on it.

I have a Creative sound card from 1989. I used it in 2001 under linux as a radio modem. I am sure that it's designers must never have dreamt of such a use. Keeping the specs open results in more markets. But then you need brilliant managers to exploit these niches. Think business models and environments.

...

The other options are to buy linux compatible hardware. This will increase costs which will not be acceptable to the customers when the other competitors are willing to do it cheap for them.

Rony on the cheap end it's only the internal modem which is not supported. Everything else is. And for the 65536th time do factor in the OS, applications and maintanence before even talking of price. And please dont start a "illegal-is-legal-if-everybody-does-it" arg.

rgds jtd