Loading ...Linux-Watch has a great story about how one Linux devs generous offer to help commercial companies develop Linux drivers turned into a flood of both requests for help and developers wanting to help out.
As it turns out Novell’s own Greg Kroah-Hartman made an announcement in January of 2007 that he would help any company that needed drivers developed. The response that came back to him was truly a perfect storm of talent and desire all colliding. To date there are about 100 Linux driver developers working with companies on this effort with some of the resulting drivers already having made it into the kernel.
The only requirement of the device driver developers is that they must sign an NDA during the development effort, but all code for the driver is released into the kernel under the GPL.
Congratulations to everyone working on this effort that everyone will benefit from.
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 is the year of Linux Desktop!
Loading ...
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Linux is certainly on a roll with the wider consumer community, not least now Dell ships them, so the linux community will need to keep up as consumer demand starts really demanding.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:44 pm
It’s great to see the Linux community finally getting some serious support on drivers. With more and more people adopting linux as their OS of choice, it’s becoming more important to provide quality GPL drivers for the various configurations out there.
Keep it up and the world might finally be out from under the thumb of Micro$oft.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Brian you are absolutely right.
The desktop has always been fuzzy… Linux needed driver support and app support to get crazy penetration, but vendors didn’t want to invest the time without the penetration. Then the Linux community set out and started taking care of the application situation (with some awesome desktops like SUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora) and now with the push of Linux on embedded devices, I think companies in general aren’t just rolling it out as a platform internally, but are developing for it as a side effect of it being more in their field of view.
This awesome work initiated by Greg I think is going to just explode and push Linux a big step forward.
The real thread to Linux now, is itself and a possible fork.
That would split efforts and just generally suck for everyone
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I did a little writeup as well over at my blog this morning…
http://www.kyle-brady.com
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Kyle, the more coverage the better. Thanks for following up!
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I love that Linux is evolving into something so great. I’m so sick of hearing of people refuse to try linux because of driver support. Lame.
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Why is 2007 crossed out? Considering how many advances have been brought this year, I think this really is the year of linux.
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:52 pm
2007 is crossed out because I think it’s the year Linux made all the advancements necessary to hook into the desktop market… I think 2008 *will* be the year of the Linux desktop though.
October 4th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Sure it will explode, because the companies have not to do the whole work and to pay a good linux programmer with linux kernel skill. But a very fine idea from Greg. Thanks!
October 7th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Actually one of my friends first read this article and asked me to visit this page.
It’s really amazing to read this description of this article.
This article has very useful information, it will be helpful for many. Thank you so much for your help and for your efforts.
Thanks,
Alex
http://www.NobleHelp.org
February 6th, 2009 at 3:26 am
And now we are a bit into 2009 and still it’s not the year of the Linux desktop. It’s a great operating system but let’s all face it. Even if we, geeks, administrators etc are using Linux it will never be used by the masses.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Mats,
I actually drafted up an article in 2008 that was “The Year of Linux Desktop… Bullshit”, but didn’t want to deal with the flames from the community… without a commercial, single-minded drive I don’t see Linux ever dominating any desktop environments… what Linux has given us though is a platform to build off of that isn’t Mac and isn’t Windows — and I’m actually seeing this prove to be more useful in the mobile space more than anything (netbooks and lighter)… given that mobile devices are going to carry us into the Future, it may not be the Ubuntu’s of the future that dominate Windows, it might just be the core Linux kernel and base systems that dominate our devices… that’s still pretty cool.
Makes me wonder if Linux was never the tool needed to dominate the desktop — it was always a tool used to solve the problem of servers and mobile devices, but Microsoft and Apple pretty much have the desktop on lockdown.
Sort of like giving a hammer to workers that already had nailguns… they probably didn’t need the hammer, but that’s not to say the hammer isn’t useful as heck elsewhere.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I agree with you there Riyad. You actually got me motivated to write a few lines about this so thanks for that.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
No problem, please post a link to the article when done!
February 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Here you go.
http://www.nixadmins.net/2009/02/06/linux-ready-for-the-massesdesktops/