On 06/21/2012 06:02 PM, Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) wrote:
On Thursday 21 Jun 2012, Balwinder S Dheeman wrote:
In this matter (proprietary or restricted drivers or codecs) the
LinuxMint people are slightly more liberal. I test installed
LinuxMint 11 (I only this release on the USB at that time) on an
ASUS F51 a few days. The whole *installation process running off of
a USB stick took just 6 minutes* and everything, including the
Bluetooth, WiFi, touchpad scrolling and tapping, worked like a
charm. I need not mention that most of the useful and, or needed
office applications, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Gimp and
Osmo etc. are included in these Debian/Ubuntu or derivative
distributions.
For the record, I'm against proprietary drivers. My reasons for not
using them are documented somewhere in this list's archives, from a few
years ago.
Much simpler to just buy hardware that works out of the box with built-
in drivers; in the process you encourage the manufacturers who play well
with the FOSS community, rather than rewarding those who want to have
their cake (keep their interfaces secret) and eat it (still have Linux
support for their devices) too.
I agree with you, that should be the best or a usual practice indeed,
but non-free or restricted codecs or drivers can make life easier for
those who already possess windows specific machines. I remember, I
bought a pair *Surecomm* WiFi cards thinking these might be based on
Atheros' chip-set (as was advertised by the OEM), but they switched over
to Realtek's chipset without any notice. It was a real pain to see that
I could some make these work for Linux only, but not for the FreeBSD;
even the NDIS wrapper failed to recognize these because the proprietary
windows drivers shipped with these was not true 32bit binary.
ASUS Laptop I was talking about does not have any such hardware which
needs proprietary drivers.
We can/should black-list all those models and, or makes for which the
supplier and, or manufacturers are reluctant to either ship open source
drivers or provide applications notes.
I therefore, black-listed particularly *Surecomm* and *Realtek*
*RTL-808x* WiFi WLAN Interface cards, though we can download GPL'd
source and build binary modules for Realtek chip-set, but that's very
low quality code and they people failed to get their code merged into
the main-stream Linux and, or *BSD kernels.
--
Balwinder S "bdheeman" Dheeman
(http://werc.homelinux.net/contact/)
_______________________________________________
Ilugd mailing list
[email protected]
http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
