Lev's developer blog

I originally intended this blog to be about development, with programming tips, tricks, and maybe even following some open source project of mine, but for now, I just couldn’t find any suitable material of this kind to publish.

Most of the new stuff I learned recently was already well documented else were, and I did not want my blog to be a copy of a copy bringing no added value.

But I don’t want it to be strictly opinionated rants ether, so I decided to start a new series, which is something in between: technical examples (not necessarily code), that go to prove my strong opinion that Free and Open Source Software is better than closed source non free software.

I call this series: “Solution vs Products”.

In Free Software, developers always seek to provide a solution for a certain problem. Software solution that will fulfill a certain need. Very often, it is their own need, but that does not mean that others do not benefit greatly from the solution.

Companies, that build their business on Free and Open Source software like RedHat and Canonical, make money from providing solutions to their customers, not simply selling them products.

The difference, is not just a marketing slang. It is in the kinds of programs that are available, and the features these programs have. In this series, I will demonstrate my personal encounters with features of Free Software that proprietary software does not provide, and some, I believe can not provide, under its current business model.

But, rather than continuing to describe it, lets just jump to an example that will demonstrate what I am talking about:

Drivers, drivers, drivers…

One of the myths about GNU/Linux and Free operating systems in general, is that they don’t support a lot of hardware.

In plain folks talk “There ain’t no drivers for this thing…”

But reality is, that hardware support in Linux distributions is often better than in the latest version of Microsoft Windows. The myth is propagated by the fact that just about any piece of hardware you buy will have a disk with Windows drivers accompanying it, but no Linux drivers.

People don’t realize this is because such a thing is not needed.

Some time ago, I had a faithful old Pentium 4 2.8GHz computer with a simple graphics card based on Nvidia chip.

There was no driver problem for this card in Windows XP, and it was also recognized out of the box by Ubuntu 7.10, though it had to install the proprietary Nvidia driver to fully support it.

That, was actually less of a hassle than installing the driver for XP from the CD that came with the card, but since Ubuntu 7.10 is significantly newer then Windows XP, it can be forgiven.

One day, the card died (or fried, I am not sure which). Fortunately, I still had the manual for the motherboard, so I knew by the beep sounds my computer made that the fault was in the graphics card and not any other component.

I went to the nearest computer store and got a replacement card. It had the exact same Nvidia chip in it, but the card itself was from a different manufacturer then the old one.

When I plugged it in and booted up, Ubuntu worked as though nothing happened. The Nvidia driver was universal, and it didn’t care that I had a different card in, as long as it had a supported chip in it.

With XP however, the situation was not nearly as good. I had to boot up in “Safe Mode”, uninstall the old driver, then boot up in normal mode and install a different driver for the new card.

Yet another case that demonstrates this issue occurred to me when I bought a very cheap web camera as part of a bet.

The bet was simple: will it be recognized out of the box by Ubuntu? I said “yes” but some people doubted that was possible. Well, I did not have a web cam, and Office Depot were selling some dirt cheap model, so I bought it.

To be fair, I lost the bet. At the time (2008) to get a camera with that particular chip working on Ubuntu a kernel module had to be compiled.

Two years later, however, the module is now part of the official distribution, and the camera is recognized out of the box.

And what of Windows 7? Nothing. since the CD I got with the camera does not contain drivers for it, and since there is no way of identifying the cameras manufacturer (it carries no trademarks), it is useless for Windows user.

Fortunately, I am not a Windows user…

One last case of “driver issues” I keep running in to at work, is with Android devices.

These devices (mostly phones and tablets) use a system called Android Debug Bridge (ADB for short), to communicate with the PC to aid in developing software. Through ADB the developer can debug applications (duh!), read system logs, get shell access to the device and more.

When working on Windows, every individual Android device needs a special driver to be recognized for ADB connection. Even two different phones from the same manufacturer need separate drivers.

This drives a couple of Android developers I know crazy.

On Linux, on the other hand, no driver is necessary. The PC side ADB component can locate any ADB capable device connected to USB and communicate with it.

I do not know what exactly caused the driver architecture to be so drastically different between Windows and Linux. Perhaps it was a purely engineering decision.

But perhaps, it was the fact that much of the hardware support for Linux had to be achieved through reverse engineering due to lack of cooperation from the manufacturers, that brought about modules that support entire families of products and kernel that provides ease of access to peripheral hardware for user-space programs even without a kernel module.

Either way, we have here three small examples where Free Software makes life easy while proprietary software gives you a headache.

Next up: Emergency computer resurrection: a vital solution no proprietary software company could possibly provide.

Stay tuned!