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  • 16-01-2009 1:57am
    #1
    witnessmenow
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,264 ✭✭✭


    I got a tv tuner with my laptop when i bought it a few years ago that i found over the Christmas. Since i used it last i re-installed windows and dual installed ubuntu 7.10

    I went to install the tuner on windows, not too bad cause i still had the laptops driver CD. Spent a good half an hour or more looking for a free software to use with it and eventually got something that worked grand. I used it to take a few screen shots for my website and plugged it out when i was done. Tried to plug it in a few hours later, asks me to install the drivers again so i try and try and the thing just will not work again (problem installing driver)

    Boot into ubuntu, go to device manager and see the thing is being reconised (no need for a driver), go to add/remove applications type in "TV" a few seconds later I find an application that will do the job for me , it installs itself automatically and bobs your uncle im up and running.

    Card works perfect every time in linux, cant get it working again in windows. And they say its harder to use linux :)

    Time spent trying to get it working in windows - over a hour
    time spent getting it working in linux - 5 mins (inc downloading and installing the application)


Comments

  • #2
    Heinrich
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,577 ✭✭✭Heinrich


    I have similar experience with a scanner which was recognised. It recognises my iPod, laser printer, other machines on a small network and USB stick. It did not like my A3 bubblejet printer (5 years old) and an external HDD. I will be looking into that next.

    On a Windows reinstall you need a rake of drivers from chipset to all peripherals and there's no guarantee that all will work in Vista...

    The ony problem I had was that I had to install Windows first. I looked for info on this and got a fair few "opinions". What I wanted was to install Ubuntu on a virgin machine. But that's another story. Otherwise I find Ubuntu great and pretty user friendly. The 6 year old niece has no problems with her CBBies.


  • #3
    generalmiaow
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 865 ✭✭✭generalmiaow


    It's handy that way. It's amazing how many drivers are just built in, but annoying when certain conspicuous ones aren't... things like really obscure scanners and generally speaking most cheap peripherals from fleabay always work, but some USB wifi sticks just don't, even when they have popular chipsets like ralink, zydas or realtek. (The drivers are usually there, but can't be included for political reasons).

    I love that you almost never have to get drivers but it annoys me that when you do, you sometimes have to recompile them every time your kernel upgrades which is a normal part of the update experience.

    It's not very user friendly that way. If someone could write a graphical driver manager that just eats a source tarball and keeps it up to date with a kernel (maybe it could even download new versions somehow?) it would enhance things considerably. I know that you have modules in repositories, but usually the sorts of drivers you need to get linux around the quirks of a new laptop are patched by a random French guy out of kindness and aren't refined enough to get in official repositories.

    Although there's no OS with an easy way to get at drivers apart from DOS. With DOS you could see every driver that was loaded in CONFIG.SYS, all the parameters and IRQs and that... I have NO idea what drivers my XP systems are using (as in the actual files and in what order) because it's all so abstracted and weird, and macs are the same. If you look out there there's also a big gap in the explanation of how linux drivers work which is very hard to cross.


  • #4
    towel401
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,917 ✭✭✭towel401


    generalmiaow wrote: »
    I love that you almost never have to get drivers but it annoys me that when you do, you sometimes have to recompile them every time your kernel upgrades which is a normal part of the update experience.


    if you compile your own kernal you wont have that problem since it wont be updated automatically anymore (and automatically updated kernels are just patched /rehashed versions of the same kernel anyway) and find more

    drivers are usually in the form of kernel modules ( .ko ) and you can see a list of them with 'lsmod' that will list them all except the ones that are compiled into the kernel

    now usually the kernel supplied with a distro doesn't have too many drivers compiled in because its going out to a whole bunch of different people with different hardware so lsmod will show most of them


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