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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!col.hp.com!nntp.coast.net!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!nwnews.wa.com!news1.halcyon.com!coho!tzs From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.os.linux,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: a monthly FreeBSD magazine (and other *BSD's too) Date: 2 Jan 1996 01:58:54 GMT Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services Lines: 41 Message-ID: <4ca3gu$4nc@news1.halcyon.com> References: <4ajc07$sb7@unix2.glink.net.hk> <4bthbq$mfp@mark.ucdavis.edu> <4c8o00$p5e@news1.halcyon.com> <4c9op2$k9o@mark.ucdavis.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:31463 alt.os.linux:6715 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:11175 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:1672 David E. O'Brien <obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu> wrote: >Tim Smith (tzs@coho.halcyon.com) wrote: >: David E. O'Brien <obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu> wrote: >: >Once again we have ignorance about FreeBSD. The reason for slower driver >: >development isn't because of the structured development nature of FBSD. >: >RATHER it is because FBSD has a smaller user base, and thus a smaller >: >number of people that have weird hardware and gets a hair up their ass to >: >write a driver for it. There is NOTHING stopping Joe User from writing a >: >: Your theory can be seen to be bull by simply noticing that FreeBSD >: driver development slowness is not limited to weird hardware. > >Again in English. Please expound on this so I have some idea to what you >are refering to. I'm refering to your odd theory that FreeBSD driver development is slow because there are less people with weird hardware using FreeBSD. This is an odd theory in two respects: 1. As someone else has pointed out, there is plenty of weird hardware that FreeBSD does get drivers for, sometimes even before Linux does, so it is not even clear that the theory that FreeBSD driver development is slow is correct. For the rest of this post, we'll assume that it is slow. 2. There is hardware that is *not* weird at all the FreeBSD is behind in support for. IDE CD-ROM, for example. Even Warp and NT, the usual champions for being late to support hardware, have no trouble with my Toshiba IDE CD-ROM, for example, but FreeBSD 2.1 won't see it during install. I haven't peeked into the box yet to see if I've got master/slave set to the way FreeBSD wants it to be, but their are two possibilities: (a). I've got it set wrong. If so, this is a deficiency in FreeBSD CD-ROM support, because NT, Warp, DOS, Linux, and Windows 95 all have no trouble with it set the way it is. (b). I've got it set right. If so, something's wrong with FreeBSD. Now, these bugs are not surprising, because the IDE CD-ROM support is labeled as alpha, so I'm not complaining. --Tim Smith