On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 12:23 -0500, Christian Convey wrote: > Alvin Oga wrote: > > On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Christian Convey wrote: > > > > > >>Hi guys, > >> > >>Recently I've spent a lot of time digging through udev / hotplug issues, > >>getting to know modprobe, modules.conf, alsaconf, XF86Config-4 etc. > >>This was all to get a digicam and a flashdrive to be useful, or to make > >>sound/video work. > > > > > > things do "just plug it in and it works" > > [snip] > > > > - the point .. use a good installer and supported hardware and the > > problems does NOT exist > > > > c ya > > alvin > > > > I used Sarge's new installer, which I think most people reckon to be > pretty good. And yet I've still had these issues. > > But the issues I've faced would, I think, mainly be issues that arise > after the OS is installed. So I'm not sure this can be entirely chalked > up to the quality of the distro's installer. > > For example: I plug in a USB trackball, and on Windows it just works > (although it might prompt me to supply a driver). When I did this on > linux, I had to tinker with gpm, and I had to modify my XF86Config-4 > file as well. See the last paragraph. > Another example: I plug in a usb flashdrive, and I have to go much with > the udev rules manually to assign it a filename that's based on the > drive's identity or volume info. See the last paragraph. > I'm not complaining - I get far more than what I paid for with Debian. > I'm mostly just curious about whether the difference in user experiences > is a necessary consequence of Linux's hardware model, or is it due to > some other factor? > > Possible factors I can think of include: > - The Bazzare development model leads to people spending energy > developing multiple approaches (i.e., alsa vs. arts, x.org vs. xf86 > vs. ...) rathre than putting all our efforts towards polishing one > particular model. This has been argues 100,000 times in the past 10 years. One word: volunteers. Two words: Open Source. There are multiple projects for a bunch of reasons: "I can do a better job." "Having multiple competing projects is a *good* thing. Compe- tition drives progress." "Your project is full of jackasses." "Project X doesn't do what *I* need done, and they won't accept my patches, for whatever good/bad/unknown reason, so I start my own project Y, either from scratch or by forking X." "We think that Project X is fundamentally flawed. The current maintainer thinks it's great." "Project X's copyright owner just decided to relicense it in a non-free or non-DFSG manner, so we *must* either fork or begin from scratch." > - People don't want to muck with Linux's flexibility. I.e., perhaps > making USB keychains "just work" would require fixating certain > details of device handling. I.e., it would require giving up some > of the flexibility that udev / hotplug currently permit via > user-supplied rules. I don't know about other distros, but even with all the udev+ GNOME 2.8 spiffiness(*), Debian *is* more DIY than most other distros. And that's OK. I *like* it's mixture of GUI abilities and need to edit text files in an xterm. It gives me more control. If you want something more for newbies, go to Libranet, Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix. All of which are, guess what, based on Debian. *) With g-v-m+hal, GNOME auto-detects the images in my Kodak DX4530, and asks if I want to move them to hard disk (and I didn't have to configure anything to get that to happen). -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson, LA USA PGP Key ID 8834C06B I prefer encrypted mail. "Peace won by compromise is usually a short-lived achievement." Winfield Scott (?)
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