playdayz wrote:Should Three-Headed Dog try to accommodate more drivers and firmware, even to the extent of growing by 5MB?
playdayz, it's really a question of WHAT additional drivers are available, and which should be included.
The vendor-provided Ralink and Realtek wifi drivers are prime candidates for inclusion in Puppy ....
but the separate dotpets of these drivers that I provided for Puppy 5.1 to 5.2.8 required extensive testing by various forum members before I knew which particular driver versions worked, and which didn't.
The vendor-supplied Ralink rt3070sta driver - version 2.3.0.1, for example, works really well with the 2.6.33.2 kernel in Puppy 5.1 to 5.2.8. But it took months of of trial and error before we worked this out. And it's a messy situation - this driver claims an overlapping range of device ID's already claimed by the standard rt2870sta and rt2800usb drivers already in Puppy.
Now that we're dealing with a new kernel in Puppy 529, it's uncertain whether this driver is still the best option, or whether the more recent vendor-supplied rt3370sta driver will be best, or whether the standard rt2800usb driver is now stable and the vendor-supplied driver is unnecessary! There are just too many question marks, so I think the Ralink and Realtek third-party wifi drivers should remain separate driver dotpets.
So my suggestions for additional drivers are just these important two:
- There's a new Broadcom wifi driver in the 2.6.37.6 kernel which you didn't enable, and I think it should be.
It's called
brcm80211 and it's in the "staging" section of the kernel configuration.
This will require additional firmware, which I can source for you.
Hopefully this will fix the problem of modern Broadcom wifi devices not working with the standard b43 driver, and the proprietary "wl" driver will no longer be a necessary last resort.
- "Fusion" SCSI interface support.
For many years Puppy has included extensive SCSI interface support, but a glaring omission has been "Fusion MPT" SCSI support, mainly for SCSI interfaces by LSI. These are found on Dell PowerEdge servers, for example; one of the most common SCSI-equipped computers on the market. The kernel configuration option I'm referring to is found at:
Device Drivers > Fusion MPT device support
Enabling this option will change the kernel image slightly, and it will then offer the option of adding 3 (necessary) kernel modules:
mptspi
mptfc
mptsas