Way back in the olde tymes, I was having trouble with the NIC driver in my Linux install. I posted a question about it on USENET, and got a reply from the guy who wrote the drivers. He asked for some info about the card, then updated the driver to support it.
Damn… now that’s a wholesome moment 🥹.
There used to be a lot of cards based on same or similar chips, but with small differences. That made little changes to drivers common. It’s a bit like LCD modules or audio chipset quirks. One driver with tons of little differences depending on what each manufacturer decided to do differently.
Yeah, I know, that’s why the kernel with the drivers is not more than 150MB. Otherwise, you’d have the Windows situation where driverpacks compressed with 7z (LZMA2, solid archive, 273 word dictionary size and 2GB decompression memory, which requires about 128GB of RAM to compress) take about 30GB.
You have to pack the driver from each manufacturer bescuse of signatures, even though they might even be the same with other drivers in the pack… but, REV differs and oh well, the driver installer doesn’t recognize that driver as a valid one for that device.
Of course, the kernel drivers are now commonly signed. The real problem is catering to manufacturers demanding to have their own bespoke driver pack, often including some stupid branded management application, when it’s just the same as the other dozen manufacturers packaging of the same product. Then you end up with bloated “driver packs” and a system tray of a half dozen vendors screaming for you to pay attention to them and know that they are somehow contributing to your experience.
In Linux, you have a kernel driver and a myriad of vendor’s pci ids mixed together and the vendors just have to deal with it. As a side effect, a USB to serial dongle is about 99% likely to work in Linux, and in my experience 90% unlikely to work in Windows (can’t find the driver for it, or in one very prominent case Microsoft bans drivers of counterfeit chips that function fine, but violate IP rights). Punishing the counterfeiters may have been understandable, but ultimately the unwitting customers paid rather than the counterfeiters (they still sold their devices, but the users that were oblivious suffered).
The worst of these is Bluetooth. I bought a USB dongle with a chipset said to be compatible.(CSR 8510 A10) Then I found it was a knockoff version of the chipset with some weird ass quirks that make it incompatible with the official drivers. To this day it’s the one thing I never bothered to try and fix, even though others have succeeded in making the fix. The fix wasn’t something I could easily turn into a DKMS module as I have no idea how to do that, and as a result it had to be compile with the kernel manually and I want ready to go diving into kernel and at the same time also trying to work out exactly what the quirks were.
I eventually bought a dongle with a chipset that worked was either not a knockoff or it was a perfect reproduction. It worked flawlessly, and I’ve bought more since then for PCs with no Bluetooth support.
Back in the day I was running GLTron on an Athlon 1800+ w/Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) and I was running dual monitors. GLTron didn’t like using both screens since it presented as a peculiar resolution. So I emailed the GLTron dude and he quickly emailed me a patch that let me run the game across both monitors (bezels not an issue because I was doing multiplayer split screen).
What a great game.
Shoutout to screenshot tools
For all we know, he does wear a cape.
I wish capes were socially acceptable to wear again
And get stuck in turbines and shit?
NO CAPES!!!
Break away fasteners are a thing now. Line it with some Kevlar fibre and some good thermal insulation/fire resistance and you have an amazing utility device.
In public, it billows behind you, making you look dashing and heroic. When the shit hits the fan, instant bullet resistant cover for civilians. A way to shield them from the heat of a fire, or a small explosion. You could even use it offensively to tangle or deceive an opponent!
There is absolutely no way in hell a bullet-proof cape is billowing in the wind.
It won’t stop a direct shot, but it would help against ricochet and shrapnel.
Back during the Napoleonic wars, silk underlayers were highly sought after. They could limit the damage a musket ball could do.
A spider silk based cape could definitely help projectile damage, while still being able to billow. The challenge would be making it fire and heat proof as well.
It’s more of a projectile resistance than full proofing.
You should talk to that guy who made bulletproof Kimonos for Steven Seagal
You’ve just sold this idea to public schools in America.
Imagine if you suddenly get cornered by a runaway bull. What would you do without a cape?
That works but the fastener can’t be metal. Come across somebody with magnetic powers or for some reason the metal gets heated up and welds to itself… Bad times. But I think you’re onto something.
Agreed on the metal clips. Getting garrotted by your own safety system would be extremely detrimental in a fight. Though saying that, if you’re in a fight with a metal telekinetic, you’re either screwed, or strong enough to not care about the clip.
lucky for me I don’t often interact with things like that
How about revolving doors?
Or doors on a bus, or elevator, or escalator (depends on the length of the cape)
I’d settle for a cloak. A nice leather, or heavy woollen cloak would be amazing for being outside on cold evenings.
Unfortunately, they are still seen as dark and ‘edgy’. Moreso even than a trenchcoat. ☹️
Stop giving so many fucks about what other people think about your fashion. You do you, fam.
Unfortunately, it would likely be detrimental to my ongoing work situation.
Though saying that, the BBC had a guy who would turn up to work dressed as a wizard (think harry potter style). He was the reason Teletext continued for so long. He was the last one left on the team. They retired Teletext the day after he retired himself.
I’m still not sure I have the force of personality to not just look like an idiot try hard however. 🤷♂️
Maybe a rainbow unicorn cloak?
A lot of Linux drivers are like this - just one or two people maintaining them. They usually eventually mainline the driver rather than having a separate Git repo though.
It’s mind boggling just thinking that things like this depend on the effort of one or two guys… while on the other hand, it’s not so uncommon that a team of engineers and developers fails to deliver a working (mostly) bugfree product.
I think management is who is responsible for the shitty decisions, as always… and, in general, just holding the team back.
What’s the deal with Nebraska? Are people from there like really polite and helpful?
There’s nothing to do in Nebraska except drink and maintain Linux drivers
Lol 🤣🤣🤣
It’s just a random location that was chosen for the joke, it’s in the middle of nowhere
Oh, OK, I think I get it, we have a place like that in jokes over here as well, except it’s made up 😂.
The thing with drivers is that the hardware they’re written for doesn’t really change. A particular network card is always going to behave the same way. Once the driver works well, it’s pretty much complete, and the only changes that are needed are bug fixes, updates to handle new firmware, or adjustments if the kernel changes some implementation detail of how drivers are used. There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Yes, but someone still has to implement that “a thing or two” in it every few years.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
Agreed. But, to be honest, most aren’t. Just take a look at Realtek. There’s bound to be at least one chip made by them on your board (in most cases, two, LAN and audio, two very crucial pieces of hardware).
Realtek NICs are junk (even the buggy Intel I225-v chip is better) so I try to avoid them, but I honestly haven’t ever checked which sound chip my motherboard uses. I’ll have to check if it’s a Realtek one. Realtek is generally the lower-end manufacturer for cheaper products.
Had some problems while trying to compile and install a WiFi driver for the first time. Managed to find the email of the driver’s creator and sent them a message. They responded a few hours later with incredibly helpful guidance, walking me through the process and enabling me to get it working, all while gaining valuable insights…
This is the way
Shoutout to this guy for maintaining my mainboards temperature sensors and pwn fan headers: https://github.com/Fred78290/nct6687d
Without this and https://github.com/codifryed/coolercontrol my PC was either a jet engine from the sounds or a nuclear reactor from heat constipation.
Some dude wrote a driver for the temp sensors on my motherboard… Then quit maintining it because people were being shitty
https://github.com/a1wong/it87
DRIVER REMOVAL NOTICE ===================== I have been unable to meet support demands for this driver, resulting in unpleasant experience and frustration for everyone involved. Consequently, the driver will be removed from github, effective August 1, 2018. Interested parties are encouraged to clone the driver before that time and to start maintaining it on their own.
This guy still maintains it87: https://github.com/frankcrawford/it87
I’ve was using his for years on my old motherboard, since the mainline it87 didn’t play nicely.
Thought I should mention, he is also slowly adding his changes to the mainline kernel.
Wow, thats just plain stupid. I hope someone forked it.
Fred78290 is the man. Much better than Fred78920
Of course he’s better, he’s a whole 630 Freds above the other one.
But on the whole, every Fred counts.
Software discoverability on linux sucks so much omg. I was looking for something like coolercontrol for almost forever and I find it now that I dont need it anymore.
Uh, really? I find it to be much easier.
aptcontains almost everything, and for a niche thing like yours, a Google foraio fans linuxcame back with the first result of a reddit thread including the above software, and liquidctl which it uses and is all over the place. I have way more trouble finding things for Windows, but maybe that’s because 98℅ of my use case isn’t gaming.i searched it at the time and all i could ever find was fancontrol.
which is fine and solved my problem, but 99% of niche linux software i use was found through forums like lemmy, on recommendation of other nerds. hardly a good way to find it quick.
ideally searching a distros app store should find almost everything, more or less like android can do today.
While I agree with the sentiment, you’re comparing a mobile OS, built that way from the ground up, to a desktop OS. The same problem exists in Windows and MacOS.
it does, and we ain’t in the ideal world! heres the thing, on one hand they got more media covering them, but on the other they use an universal kind of installer.
worse, some devs will spin .exes and .dmgs but on linux they wont even bother giving you an install script sometimes, let alone using flatpak which is a solution that fixes most of those problems.
This is the link to the GitHub repository h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶/̶/̶g̶i̶t̶h̶u̶b̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/̶m̶o̶r̶r̶o̶w̶n̶r̶/̶8̶8̶1̶2̶a̶u̶-̶2̶0̶2̶1̶0̶6̶2̶9̶ Give them a star.
(I also looked for a donation link, but couldn’t find one.)
There’s such a lot of those heroes! I have some weird USB WiFi thing and there’s someone maintaining a driver for it!
Yo I’m looking for something like that right now for Linux, what’s the name of it??
This is a list of USB WiFi cards endorsed by FSF
Wifi dongle?
Its these kind of people that give me hope
To be honest, yes. In general, not just tech or Linux related stuff. You look at humanity and what it has come down to, and then you notice these people… and hope fills your heart again.
The vast majority of my open source projects, I’m the only user. I release it open source because back in the day, GitHub only allowed open source projects if you want to use it.
But another reason is the hope that someone will find it helpful. If not the project itself but maybe the code.
I have one project that has a significant following and honestly it’s sometimes very scary because I might not want to keep it updated because of my own interests changing.
That’s the great thing about open source though. Sure, you might drop off the face of the earth tomorrow. But if you do, the code is there, and maybe someone who was using it clones the repo and carries on that work.
Oh hey I have the same wifi card series (little usb dongle thingy). I use the aircrack drivers when i use it. https://github.com/aircrack-ng/rtl8812au
Why aren’t these drivers installed by default yet
They’re still waiting to be mainstreamed into the kernel. The process of integrating drivers into the kernel is complicated. Coding practices of the coder that wrote the driver play a large part in that. Buggy or badly written code will not get accepted. Not all of these drivers have the code quality that is required in order to be merged with the kernel.
A god among men
One of the best parts about Linux. So much is open source which means your 20 year old hardware still likely has support.
Shoutout to https://github.com/clnhub/rtl8192eu-linux for monitor mode and packet injection <3
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