DVD Players 4242

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As a Free Software programmer, I can tell you that it's not a nightmare. It's not much of a big deal at all, in reality.

If you write portable code, you generally have code that works on any there are tools like autoconf that can handle this for you. Portability between different Linux distributions is a much simpler problem than portability between different UNIX vendors' systems, yet the majority of free software already works on most contemporary UNIX systems.

In short, it's a non-problem for all but a few exceptional programs, which might be tied to various kernel or libc versions (typically linux kernel support utilities e.g. modutils)

They contribute the driver to the Linux kernel maintainers, it gets included in the kernel mainline, and all the distributions distribute it.

If a manufacturer wants to release a binary-only driver, that's their support problem. Binary-only drivers *are* a support nightmare. This is why no company does this unless they are masochists. Releasing the driver as source and getting it included in the kernel pushes the support onto the kernel and distribution maintainers, which is a better plan all round.

That's why most people don't build from source. For those that do, they can generally build their distribution's packages from source (in Debian, this is what package build dependencies are for). If you want to build directly from the release tarballs, you do need a clue.

Regards, Roger

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