Still no kmod for new nvidia

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2010-07-30 at 06:28 -0400, David wrote:
> Again - Windows "Driver hell"? I don't know of any. Examples please.

I don't know if this counts as "driver hell", but it was certainly
"hell" when it happened. A year or two back I purchased an HP Photosmart
all-in-one scanner/printer. It has its own Ethernet connection and I
plugged it into my router.

My wife's iMac saw it and it worked immediately. Time invested: close to
zero.

On my Fedora system I installed hplip and it saw the printer and scanner
and both worked. Time invested: maybe 10 minutes.

On my daughter's laptop (Windows Vista) it took multiple installations
of the CD software (which turned out not to be compatible with Vista),
followed by repeated email interactions with HP Support, plus
downloading various updated packages which didn't work, then downloading
other versions which finally worked but only after burning to a physical
CD before installation (good thing the laptop has an optical drive),
before finally getting the printer to work most of the time. I also had
to mess with Vista's "user-friendly" control panel to get the wireless
connection to work reliably. I never did get the scanner to work as it
was easier to scan on Fedora and copy the results. Time invested: over a
week.

Maybe this is all easier under Windows 7, and maybe HP has updated their
software to make it less of a pain, but that wasn't the case when I was
doing it. Even though it was clearly HP's fault, it gives the lie to the
idea that installing hardware under Windows is always seamless, even
when it's officially supported (Windows is the only "supported" system
according to the box the printer came in).

poc