Foreign Device Drivers WAS: sucks!

[Mike McCarty]

ethericalzen at gmail.com wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Nov 2006 11:25:22 -0600
> Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net> took out a #2 pencil and
> scribbled:
> 
> 
>>We already have the "captive NTFS" project which loads "foreign"
>>device drivers. Why not build upon that effort? Isn't this
>>something worthy of discussion?
> 
> 
> Whoops, itchy ctrl-enter fingers there. It is indeed worthy of
> discussion. I'm not at all opposed to discussing things such as
> building upon or improving things like nvidia and NTFS. Isn't that
> similar to what livna (I don't regularly use livna so I'm speaking
> outside my realm of experience here at this point) does or at least
> attempts to do?

I'm not familiar with livna. I've barely used NTFS on a couple of
occasions, and then only to read.

[snip]

> Would I prefer to have that sort of thing native within linux?
> Sure, but currently that's not the reality of it and will not be
> for some time. Quite some time, unfortunately. As a side question,
> do you believe that this makes linux less of an "average user" sort
> of OS? 

Of course, doing things natively is usually superior to using
foreign. Yes this is one of the ways that Linux is more of a
"techie" vs. "Joe Schmoe" targetted OS.

Anyone interested in investigating what it would take to encourage

[1] The owner of the captive NTFS to consider expanding the project
to be more general, perhaps being able to load other drivers and

[2] The Linux kernel developers to make something like this be
part of the regular distro kernel?

If a few respond positively, then perhaps we can make some progress
instead of whining perpetually about how the OTHER OS always has
drivers for it, but we don't get 'em.

Mike
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