Its these kind of people that give me hope
Shoutout to screenshot tools
There’s such a lot of those heroes! I have some weird USB WiFi thing and there’s someone maintaining a driver for it!
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
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 because 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.
