Dear Fedora Community, what do you want?

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 09:52 6/3/2004, Scott Sloan wrote:
>"Give me a list of what the Linux community is seeking as far as
>hardware support and I'll see if I can get some bodies working on it.
>With a convincing email or two and we should be able to get it done"

I don't know about a convincing email or two, but I have the following wish 
lists as far as hardware support:

         1. Open standards and API's so that others can write drivers even 
if the manufacturer doesn't. Competition in almost anything is a good 
thing, and a manufacturer with an open, published API may well find that 
they get a lot of help on their drivers from the open community. And since 
such help is gratis, that's a great thing for *any* hardware manufacturer. 
Besides, it ensures that anyone with enough time/money/commitment can write 
or create a driver for any operating system as long as the hardware itself 
continues to function. This should be a "win" for the hardware maker too... 
it does not only benefit the users!

         2. Emerging technologies. USB hot-swapping and overall support, 
APM and ACPI power management, dynamically-adjustable CPU frequencies and 
attributes, FireWire, and others are sore spots today. More support in 
these areas could make the average user's life an order of magnitude 
easier. Better hardware *detection and identification* would make this yet 
another joy.

         3. At least some specific support for Linux. Printer manufacturers 
should provide some info to the CUPS project, monitor manufacturers should 
send full specs to XFree86 and Xorg as well as a few distributors (Red Hat, 
SuSe, Debian ought to cover it). Sound card people should talk to the ALSA 
project. From there those parties would ensure the information spread 
properly (even to competing projects!). This is very, very low-cost and 
low-effort but can bring a remarkable benefit to the manufacturer in 
increased sales.

         4. Work with OEM's (from IBM, Toshiba, Dell, HP down to small 
clone manufacturers) to enable more companies to PRELOAD Linux on new 
computers sold. The huge majority of Windows users get their Windows 
preinstalled and do not ever reinstall it except from a "nuke your hard 
drive and reimage" CD that was included. Linux could do just as well, and 
the user would not have to worry about most of the issues that come up 
regularly on installation (just like they don't worry about those issues on 
Windows). Besides, preloading is the way that most people first encounter 
Windows and is a great way to cut down MS revenue while increasing market 
share.

Just my two bits here, hope it's useful.

Cheers,


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com