5 Oct
2018
5 Oct
'18
11:37 a.m.
On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 02:48:35 -0700
William Morder <doctor_contendo(a)zoho.com> wrote:
On Friday 05 October 2018 00:19:47 Felmon Davis wrote:
Um, no, "driver"--a piece of software that makes it possible to communicate
with
a piece of hardware--is the correct term, and you're using them all the time in
Linux,
too. It's just that most of the more common ones are treated as part of the kernel
(or of CUPS and its supporting packages), so you never notice them.
There are a lot of drivers that are or have been maintained outside the kernel, though,
and these often have to be installed separately. The printer drivers and the proprietary
3D acceleration drivers for nVidia and AMD are the most common, but there are
others: drivers for network equipment, modems, smartcard readers, crypto dongles,
game controllers, and other oddly specific hardware that most people never run
into. They may or may not be in your distro's repositories, depending on who wrote
the driver, what the distro's position on proprietary code is, and other factors.
I'm currently running an externally packaged driver for my motherboard's internal
sensor chip, because support for the it87 family of chips has been slow in reaching the
kernel.
TL;DR: drivers have always been in Linux, too, and they're not going anywhere.
E. Liddell
On Thu, 4 Oct 2018, J Leslie Turriff wrote:
Maybe what was meant was dependencies rather than drivers? Brother printers,
and other such items, are special cases, because one doesn't get the deb
packages (or rpm, yum, etc., according to the distro) from the standard
repositories, but must download them from the manufacturer's website. (I,
too, wrestle with a Brother printer.) There, perhaps, one means to say
drivers, even if they are deb packages.
When I read the word *driver*, however, I immediately thought that it sounded
more like a Windoze or rotten Apple user, who had recently switched to Linux,
and was unfamiliar with the repositories, or how to use apt. If we knew more,
we might be able to make suggestions, or offer other help. On 2018-10-01 14:21:14 Kate Draven wrote:
[ ... deleted ... ]
not sure what counts as a 'driver' but I have had to install some
package for Brother printers and 'firmware' for wifi (Intel).
if this is just a matter of semantics then let's not fuss.
the fact remains that for some it's not all "out of the box" or
whatever to call it.
f. As for drivers,what do you mean? I've never
had to install drivers. I
HAVE had to install them in Apple and MS. That's a nightmare. Perhaps
I'm mistunderstood (which is likely).
The only ones I know of are the video drivers (which are optional).
Leslie