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Eaton announces UPS support for Ubuntu (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch
reports
on a Ubuntu-compatible UPS product from Eaton.
"What's important about this is that it shows Ubuntu is being taken seriously by IHVs. Peripheral builders do not go to the trouble of making software for a Linux distribution, much less going to the additional expense and time of getting certification, unless they believe consumers and businesses are going to be adopting it in large, that is to say, profitable, numbers. That is especially true in the small margin, small volume world of less common peripherals such as UPSs."
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Eaton announces UPS support for Ubuntu (Linux-Watch) Posted Nov 29, 2007 22:16 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] Except that in reality Debian handles most UPS out of the box, through one of upsd, powstatd, nut, genpower, apcupsd, etc. UPS vendors target servers where the level of Linux adoption is much higher, and UPS drivers tend to be trivial. Par for the course for Linux-watch.
Eaton announces UPS support for Ubuntu (Linux-Watch) Posted Nov 29, 2007 23:10 UTC (Thu) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] "Personal Solution Pac is open-source software released under a GPL License and based on NUT (Network UPS Tools). Eaton will continue to support the NUT open-source project..." "Because Ubuntu is one of the fastest-growing Linux distributions, we feel it is important to offer users the assurance of compatibility that comes with being a certified hardware partner."
Eaton announces UPS support for Ubuntu (Linux-Watch) Posted Nov 30, 2007 0:31 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] Nut has long been supported by MGE, Inc. That's why I chose MGE to purchase my UPSes from, a few years ago. (Also the fact that they had a reputation for quality equipment.) http://opensource.mgeups.com/index.htm http://opensource.mgeups.com/contrib.htm http://www.debian.org/partners/
Yes, but... Posted Nov 30, 2007 4:16 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Except that in reality Debian handles most UPS out of the box, through one of upsd, powstatd, nut, genpower, apcupsd, etc. True, but I think the gist of the article is about how IHVs are recognizing that the consumer PC market doesn't end at Microsoft or Apple. And that Linux (er, Ubuntu) has enough street credibility to justify advertising its support. Most hardware is supported by Linux "out of the box"; it's just that usually all one sees on the side of the box is "Requires Microsoft Windows or Mac OS."
Yes, but... Posted Nov 30, 2007 8:43 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] My contention is that UPS vendors are an exception to this rule, and tend to support Linux and advertise this support since a long time. But they do not really target the consumer PC market, but rather the server market. Using them as example of consumer PC IHV recognizing Linux is flawed.
Yes, but... Posted Nov 30, 2007 22:38 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] Yes, this just follows the pattern... Multi-serial cards had good Linux support because they sold mostly to people with know-how and racks of machines, people who'd buy one card rather than another because Linux was known to work well and that mattered to them. Whereas in the same time frame, joysticks had lousy support because joystick manufacturers knew that their market were DOS (or later Windows) owners who bought the coolest looking stick and expected their games to work with it. Or look at Itanium and x86-64, both launched as server products, although x86-64 was expected to go more mainstream quickly, but to have a server product you need Linux support, and sure enough Intel and AMD supplied documentation, simulators and eventually test hardware to get Linux running on these platforms. While in the same period, plenty of new webcams were shipped, most of them with poor or missing Linux support. Because again, people who buy webcams don't care whether it works with Linux (or, they don't think they care until it's too late). The biggest friend Linux has had over the past decade has been standardization. A randomly selected PS/2 mouse, PCI Firewire card, USB memory stick, or DVD writer will almost certainly work in your Linux PC because there's an industry standard interface. Meanwhile an add-on SATA card, a USB DVB-T decoder, or the onboard 3D video chipset are likely to be more of a problem to get going because industry standards don't exist, (or in the case of SATA and webcams, were late to arrive causing market fragmentation) and so someone needs to have written a working driver for the specific device you bought, and then got it integrated into a kernel, which then has to make its way into your preferred distro. Though the work of intrepid reverse engineers is to be applauded and encouraged, it's no substitute for the certainty you feel when you buy a product that market forces have insisted is only available in standards compliant form. It might even be worth putting some Free Software money into developing such standards where opportunity exists. Obvious candidates would include PCI network cards and USB DVB dongles. The future effort saved by a successful standard should more than compensate for the upfront work.
Eaton announces UPS support for Ubuntu (Linux-Watch) Posted Nov 29, 2007 22:16 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Hey, that's really cool, thanks Eaton. Too bad it's not actually available for download though (as of 14:10 PST on 29 November)--the download link points at a nonexistent page.
Eaton announces UPS support for Ubuntu (Linux-Watch) Posted Nov 30, 2007 10:36 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] This is good news - of course it's probably just a crossover from server support for UPSs in Linux, but it's good that a hardware vendor is explicitly supporting an open source project as official way to manage its hardware. It's not about the code, it's about getting a vendor to support their products via open source.
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