Re: i give up

On Wednesday 03 December 2008 08:46:28 pm Robert Noland wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 22:53 -0500, Robert Atkinson wrote:
> > I second this idea since with my nearly a decade of FreeBSD
> > administration under the belt, it is a waste of my time to throw it
> > away. It is much cheaper for me to swap a card or even task a
> > different machine for hardware that just isn't meant to be in FBSD.
> >
> > I'll use the penguin where I have too, I am forced to use it due to
> > the VPS solution I chose. The price was right and it does what I wish
> > it to do, but I would never, ever give up on the box under my desk and
> > turn my back on this otherwise outstanding operating system.
> >
> > I have however, had many users who I show Linux give up because
> > everything they own in the house is not supported. They always say
> > "isn't linux supposed to be great?" and I can only say that they
> > should learn to write device drivers and only buy hardware that has
> > well known support.
>
> Folks, I hate to contribute to this bikeshed, but developers are few,
> hardware specs are scarce and developers have to put what resources they
> have to work where it does the most good.  I personally think that we do
> a fantastic job, given the resources available, but we can't support
> every random piece of hardware.
>
> For the original poster, I hope that you will reconsider your options
> and send specific details to a wider audience than Soren.  If Soren is
> busy with life, perhaps someone else has the bandwidth to help with your
> issue.  I generally find our developer community is quite willing to
> help sort out issues, often at the expense of having a life.
>
> All of that said, when given an option I also try to acquire hardware
> from vendors that provide open documentation as attempting to reverse
> engineer, or crib from linux code is the suck...  Vendors that do
> provide open documentation are usually well supported.

If the device interface was more common between the BSDs and Linux, then the 
work would be minimal.

As long as people create/insist on incompatible interfaces, then the work will 
always be time-consuming and difficult.