Ever bought a shiny new gizmo for your computer, plugged it in and had a not-too-pleasant looking box appear asking you to install or locate drivers?
**WARNING: Geek mode=ON**
Yep, that happens pretty much everytime you add hardware to your computer. All hardware connected to your computer needs some program somewhere to understand, to talk to it nicely. Any time you use the hardware this driver program is called, tells the hardware what you want it to do and takes care of everything necessary to make it happen.
However I have recently had a very enlightening experience. I recently bought a wireless card for my laptop which runs exclusively linux. (well it did run exclusively linux until wednesday night but that is another even geekier story) Now I have a fair amount of experience trying to get wireless cards to work in linux and know that it is shall we say, a bit tricky. So when I was shopping (read browsing ebay) I knew what to look for, how to check if the prospective card has linux drivers and even though I found such a card I was fully prepared for an afternoon of struggle. On receiving the card I went looking for the drivers I needed. First I looked for the source code. That is the lowest common denominator, if it’s open source there is always source code available. I saw they had a package for my system, easier to install but not always available. Then I found that package already installed on my system, a suprise to be sure, but the pre-installed stuff is often crap and doesn’t work. But I thought oh, what the heck I’ll just plug in the card and see what happens, should get some cool log entries if nothing else.
And it worked.
No I mean it worked… I didn’t have to install, or configure anything! Well I do have some security on my router so I had to update that to allow the laptop access but, I was dumbfounded. No disk to insert, no manual to read, no package to download, I uh, well, I just plugged it in.
I say this was enlightening for two reasons.
- As a technical professional soon to be engineer part of my job is making different bits play together nicely. That computer to work with this network card, etc. Could it be that may not always be a job requirement?
- As a future designer of such artifacts of wizardy it raises the bar a bit.
Imagine if printers worked like this card did, or like thumb-drives have recently, I mean actual real honest to goodness plug-n-play. You plug it in and it works. Scanners, mice, keyboards, digital cameras, sound cards, modems, network cards, video cards, everything needs a driver. In a few cases they are just standardized enough that you don’t have to interact with them. Keyboard, mice, and recently usb storage all have standard drivers that work with all such devices. So you don’y have to worry about the drivers, they are just there running all the time. Standardized interfaces are my new favorite thing.
**MESSAGE: Geek mode=Off**