[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Robin Cornelius wrote:
This is an avenue often overlooked. Whenever I buy new kit I try to ascertainJulian Hall wrote:An important point that applies to a lot of devices is that many hardware OEMs know almost nothing about the core of their device, they have purchased a chip from another manufacture and often just stuck it on a board with a couple of other chips, often the chipset manufacture even supplies the basic windows driver and they just brand it. Its the chipset manufactures that have the data you need (data sheets etc) and these can sometimes be persuaded to give data sheets (and some are even publicly available). I have directly experienced *huge* success in this area with wireless network drivers where the chipset manufacture has directly supported linux bypassing the OEM's.Hardware OEMs are in business to make money. You could argue the valid point that X OEM could give all the technical data to the Linux community, drop driver/module development entirely and then save all their development costs. The Linux community would use the data to produce working solutions for Linux. Come to think of it they'd also save whatever money they pay Microsoft for the privilege of getting the data from them they need to write the drivers.
the chipset used eg. I had a Median scanner but no Linux driver.After a bit of investigation I discovered the scanner had an Artec chipset. So I set up Sane to use the Artec driver (plus a proprietary file from the Windows
CD supplied with the scanner) and the scanner worked perfectly.A quick email to the developer explaining what I had achieved and how I did it probably helped no one but the info is on the website it anyone ever needs it. (Plus I got my name in lights on the website as one of the contributors which
made me feel good because I had indeed contributed.)Perhaps because my solution involved the use of a proprietary firmware file it doesn't fulfil Neil's high standards now there's another scanner which doesn't
require Windows. Keith - The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html