Question #78779 on Ubuntu changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/78779
Status: Open => Answered
Tom proposed the following answer:
Hi
Sorry no-one has got back to you sooner. It might be worth posting the same
question in a few forums
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Signpost/Questions#help
http://www.linuxquestions.org
Also try visiting the manufacturers website and see if there are any
forums worth asking in and perhaps a "Contact Us" part of their website.
Often hardware manufacturers seem to demand that you use Windows (or,
reluctantly, Mac) in order to use their product. Luckily linux devs are pretty
good at reverse engineering a lot of these things so that decent drivers can be
built but it takes time. Sometimes hardware manufacturers say stupid things
like "We haven't time to build all the different drivers for all the different
versions of linux, it costs too much to produce the 4 or 5 we need for Windows"
not realising that developing just 1 OpenSource driver would cover all the
different versions of gnu&linux, gnu&hurd, bsd, unixes and also all the Macs.
Hardware manufacturers also sometimes say they wont support use in linux
because it's such a tiny market - which is true but unlike with Apple and
Windows it's a rapidly growing, even exponentially growing, market. The
figures up to 1998 at which point it started to get silly to even try to
measure it
Year . Number of users
1991 1
1993 20,000
1995 500,000
1997 3,500,000
1998 7,500,000
1999 12,000,000
We are now seeing some hardware manufacturers such as Dell, Asus and a couple
of others starting to ship product lines with linux pre-installed and already
some people are choosing to avoid certain manufacturers such as CreativeLabs
because they don't provide linux drivers. Some analysts say that when linux
usage reaches 10% of the desktop market, it's currently estimated at 2% by
many, most hardware manufacturers will be forced into supporting linux usage of
their equipment in order to stay afloat. But by then buying trends amongst
linux users may have become established and hardware manufacturers that aren't
already supporting linux will find it difficult to break into the market!
Anyway i would seriously consider getting your money back on this
product and clearly stating that the reason for returning it is lack of
support for linux. Some people have already done this type of thing and
the more of us that do the bigger the message we send to hardware
manufacturers and the sooner we find that all this is a non-issue.
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)
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