Re: USB PCI card to buy

[Harry Rickards <hrickards@l33tmyst.com>]

On 10 Apr 2009, at 21:51, Kelly Clowers <kelly.clowers@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 07:54, Harry Rickards  
> <hrickards@l33tmyst.com> wrote:
> > On 10 Apr 2009, at 15:46, "Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca>  
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 05:37:28PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > > > > Here's the reply I received from Startech.
> > > > >
> > > > > Hi Doug,
> > > > >
> > > > > Both chipsets (Nvidia and NEC) are natively supported in the  
> > > > > Linux =
> > > > > kernel since 2.4.x, but we do not directly support these cards  
> > > > > in Linux,
> > > > > =
> > > > > nor have we tested with Debian, so compatibility cannot be  
> > > > > guaranteed.
> > > >
> > > > I would recommend letting them know that you will not buy until  
> > > > they
> > > > support Linux.
> > >
> > > But I need it so I will buy it.  From their perspective, they know  
> > > that
> > > the chipsets are supported in the linux kernel, but with all the
> > > different distributions and versions (compared to just testing for
> > > windows), it would be hard for them to test them all.
> >
> > What, Windows doesn't have many versions? Just the last few 'main'  
> > releases
> > - XP Home, Xp Pro, XP Corp, XP Home SP1, XP Pro SP1, XP Corp SP1,  
> > XP Home
> > SP2, XP Pro SP2, XP Corp SP2, XP Pro x64 SP2, XP Home SP3, XP Pro  
> > SP3, All
> > the 7 editions of Vista, all the seven editions of Vista SP1 and I  
> > won't
> > even mention Windows 7.
>
> I agree that it is not too hard to test that hardware works on  
> Linux, I disagree
> with your comparison to Windows versions. With regard to drivers,  
> the different
> versions of XP and Vista are less different than kernel 2.6.26 to
> 2.6.27 (to take
> a random example). Now the differences *between*  XP and Vista  
> drivers are
> more like the differences between 2.4 and 2.6, but that is only two  
> versions.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Kelly Clowers

I agree that there is minimal difference between the different ediions  
of Windows, but I thought that there was quite a lot of change between  
service packs, especially XP SP 1 to 2 and SP2 to 3. Also, popular  
companies, such as Belkin, seem to be supporting quite old Windows  
editions. For example, I recently bought a Belkin PCI Ethernet card (I  
had some PC World vouchers, and manged to persuade the man in the shop  
to give me a guarantee that it would work on Linux, if it was 'made in  
the last 5 years', I doubt he even knew what an OS was), that claimed  
to work on systems as old as Win95 (I think.) Surely more people use  
the latest Linux kernel than use Win95, so they could sell more  
products by supporting at least one Linux kernel, and dropping support  
for some of the older Windows editions.

Thanks
Harry