John Williamson wrote:
On 28/11/2013 14:59, dave wrote:
Stuff not working under Linux
A camera? A smart-card reader? did you lsusb them to get chipset
information? There are several packages in the Ubuntu world for handling
RAW files.

But not, as far as I can tell, the ones generated by this particular
camera. Fuji have recently changed their RAW file format.

That's not really a driver problem so much as an application problem, to
be honest.

If you want a really awful example, though, check out the National
Instruments PCI cards. National's Windows drivers pretty much work
and they are well documented and the tech support people know about them.
The Linux drivers... well, they sort of work. But they are so badly coded
that when they don't work they don't actually say that they are not working.
They'll fail to modload without giving any message, or they'll load but not
find any hardware without giving any message. They only work with certain
kernel versions, not with any 64-bit kernels or PAE kernels, but the manuals
don't say anything about that. Nobody in tech support knows a damn thing about
them, so you can pay by the minute on the tech support line to talk to someone
who has no idea even what dmesg is let alone what the driver is supposed to
be reporting.

Now, mind you, this is an NI issue and not a Linux issue, per se. But I do
encounter this a lot with companies who claim to support Linux but don't
really. (Not that a lot of the same companies also fail to support their
Windows stuff as well.)

You do need to do a little digging, which is where Linux really shines;
nobody offers you a solution upon receipt of payment. It's all for the
love of the medium. The open source world is dripping wet with good karma.

And the Windows world is full of stuff that "just works". I like this
idea, it frees me up to actually do stuff rather than fight the computer.

The nice thing about Linux is that you can look inside the box, so when it
fails to work, you can fix it. The nice thing about Windows is that it
usually just works. The problem is that when Windows systems fail to work,
you're pretty much out of luck because it's just that way and your tools for
real system-level debugging don't exist.

Given my choice, I'll run NetBSD. But usually I don't have a choice because
the application doesn't give me one.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."