On Tuesday 28 December 2004 9:26 pm, Garth Kay-Hards wrote:
> However, with all the development on Linux why has the ease of plug and play
> not kept up with Windows? Is it because device manufactures only support
> Windows? Or mostly.
That's part of it.
Another part of it is that the UNIX community (of which penguins
are an increasingly dominant part!) hasn't really been quick about
switching to a hotplug-centric ("plug'n'play") sysadmin model from
the historic "static configuration" model. There are a lot of
cultural changes to go along with the technical ones there. And
no vendor has _ever_ been able to force such major changes.
I've been pleased to see that folk are enhancing the hotplug stuff
that I started back in 2.4.early ... there's a lot of good work in
the pipeline, as systems start to build on hotplug with udev, dbus,
driver model, new kernel event schemes, and more.
> I found Mandrake 10.1 on a magazine cover last week and thought I'd buy it
> and see if this latest version had sorted out my woes, but no luck, still
> the same old problem with the USB modem and USB scanner. The mouse comes up
> on its own, the sound all works and my printer on standard printer cable,
> although not allocated the correct model, I could easily go through the
> setup and find the correct printer.
So it's getting better ... but you know, the Mandrake tools don't help
SuSE, and the SuSE tools won't much help Mandrake. That's another
issue: there's a lot of dilution of effort for sysadmin stuff.
For example, I recently noticed that SuSE 9.2 has a dialog that comes
up to configure a USB modem. (Maybe earlier versions did too.)
Of course, it came up at the wrong time -- when I was plugging in
an Ethernet/RNDIS network adapter, not a USB modem! -- but the fact
that SuSE can do this today tells me that Mandrake (and Debian,
RedFlag, etc) could also do the same thing.
Me, I'm still waiting to see sysadmin tools that do as good a
job hotplugging USB network adapters as XP does. There I've even
got the option to hook network links into a bridge, which makes
it a lot easier to use the hardware I have here. Of course
I can set all that up by hand ... but that gets annoying. For
some reason desktop Linux distros don't seem to believe in any
tools for bridging (unlike many embedded Linux products).
> In fact they system doesn't show
> USB devices in hardware setup (why?). Surely I don't have to go out and
> purchace a modem that's Linux compatible - as someone here suggested to me.
> The modem is a common Creative Modem Blaster DE5670.
According to the descriptors you posted a while back, that's got
a notable quirk (no CDC "union" descriptor) that I don't think
Linux knows how to handle yet. But other than that, I'd expect
the CDC ACM driver should handle it ... and maybe SuSE would
even automate its configuration, it as you're expecting!
- Dave
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