There are more technical problem with this than you might imagine, unless
you have actual experience in writing device drivers or kernels. There also
might be license issues -- surely at least some of the Windows drivers being
translated to Linux by this hypothetical translator would be licensed in
ways incompatible with the GPL.

Read up on the problems involved with Winmodems, for example (at
www.linmodems.com) to get a flavor of the real difficulties. In general,
unless a device's manufacturer releases, under terms compatible with the
GPL, the technical information needed to write a module, you won't see one
generally available for Linux. 

Occasionally you see non-GPL'd modules released, even sometimes by
manufacturers, to accommodate the unwillingness of manufacturers to provide
technical information without an NDA, but the vast majority of people who
actually write modules seem to be uninterested in doing this sort of work
for free (not an odd reluctance, in my opinion).

At 09:32 PM 4/8/00 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Why isn't there any sort of Windows-to-Linux driver translator? One could 
>eliminate 50% of Linux's problems (apparently)-unsupported devices!

------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA                                    [EMAIL PROTECTED]        
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