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On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Mahesh Aravind <[email protected]> wrote: > > * Support for 'modern' hardware? > So Mahesh, as promised on friday let us take a journey on this. I chose to deal with one topic a day so it won't be too much strain for me because I am behind schedule in my work place :-( Also I will try to over simplify in some places. It is not because I consider you ignorant but because there are other friends new to BSD\Unix\Linux in this list and they might require it for better apprehension on the matter Now I usually don't get into arguments about "Freedom" because you can only argue about "Freedom" only if you first come to an agreement as to what it means. The GPL and BSD guys disagree on the definition itself. So generally a debate on it is a waste of time. But differrent facets of freedom comes into play when we discuss hardware support so we will divert to them for a while and come back to the main theme as we progress some times. Also this is not to persuade you to migrate from Linux to BSD because for many purposes I my self use Linux and even "OS X" and "MS Windows" and in some spare time even "Plan9". But I hope this will give you some realistic views about Linux as well as BSD, GPL as well as BSDL and help you since you yourself admitted the comment "BSD is Lagging" was not made from first hand knowledge but from a few blogs and websites you read about this. Well If you did the homework and visited http://www.levenez.com/unix/ you will know that Unix is not an operating system ( though UNIX is an AT & T trademark ) rather a family of very many Operating Systems, not all of them Open Source and Linux is one among them. Generally they can be broadly categorized to the "BSD Stream" and "System V" stream. Let us leave it at that for now we will come back to it later God willing :-) Now Let us start discussing "Hardware Support" Now in most cases when some body talks about "Support for modern hardware" he is talking about supporting some thing like new NVIDIA Video card on his/her new desktop or a new sound card of webcam or some thing similar. So let us take a look at the Differrent Hardware available to us in this world today. Most People in India know about Intel's and AMD's x86/amd64/x86_64 architectures/platforms and think that is the whole world of computers ( If they purchased a Mac few years back they might have got a "Power PC" machine but these days Macs come on Intel Platform ). Nothing could be far from truth. There are a lot of Differrent Hardware Platforms to start from basics. An example we all have heard can be what is Anivar is using now. http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/pipermail/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org/2010-September/005303.html Newer hardware platforms are comming out which do things quite differrently from what Intel's and amd's platforms does and is preferred by differrent people for differrent purposes. Now let us see how many hardware platforms both BSD and Linux Supports. This is the list of platforms NetBSD supports http://www.netbsd.org/ports/ On a broad basis you can say it **supports 57 differrent Hardware Platforms**. Let us make this a two way learning process. You tell me with proof How many hardware platforms Linux Support? Also please tell me if I missed some thing some where or if I exagerrated or if I am in error or any other comments you need to make :-) "I am going in a very slow detailed pace because every one reading this can understand and so it will not turn out to be ego trips of a few self proclaimed geeks ;-) If some body is new to these things and has any doubts please feel free to ask. I would love to explain :-) " Now I guess if time permits we will discuss the following tomorrow. 1) Hardware specific to Intel/amd platforms 2) What Hardware support means? 3) What is a driver? 4) What is required to write a driver? i.e driver documentation or data sheet etc. 5) Who writes the driver? 6) What is a "closed source hardware" ? 7) Approaches made by differrent BSD and Linux commuities to support "closed source hardware" and their impacts of Freedom. 8) Who writes the driver? 9) What is an NDA? 10) Is it right to sign an NDA with a vendor inorder to support their hardware i one's OS? 11) The problems caused by signing an NDA and which community? BSD or LInux does that 12) RMS and NDA 13) What is done by BSD and Linux communities and RMS to free documentation ? 14) How far each community has contributed towards Freedom? 15) What can be done and is done by differrent communities when a hardware vendor does not Open up Hardware Documentation? It would be great if you can also read on some of these things so you don't have to fall into the trap of being indoctrinated by a single induvidal :-) You may start here http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/281 **Now some of you may onder why I started this series mentioning differrent hardware platforms. The reason is that some of them are better than others both "generally" and in "specific" areas." The Intel platform we use commonly are some times considered buggy and is totally discarded for certain uses. Those of you interested in this can start with these links. You might even learn how Linux developers work against GPL while sitting under GPL banner at the same time :-( http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070630105416 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070628134608 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20061006000709 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060930232710 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20040207090048 these resources of information are spread across the net so I chose to give you links from Undeadly.org where they are to some degree organized. From the undeadly page you browse the links to the actual source. So I guess i will stop for today :-) have a nice journey through truth and reality! Cheers --Siju _______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected]
