Plug and Play vs Plug and Pray

Remember the dark days of windows when everything you plugged into it wouldn't work - you would take hours with serial ports, adapters and config files ... Mac of course back then would tell you you didn't need drivers, that you just plugged things in and they worked. Not strickly true... infact you could just only use the hardware Apple sold you. Windows said you could use anything... but it didn't give you an easy time of doing so.

Then they invented things like USB... and Windows Vista.

Even XP wasn't truely plug and play flawless, usually it'd involve a manual driver install, or a regedit in some cases. And of course, just like on Linux/OSx - you have to stop/unmount a device before you could unplug it. 

In Vista this has been done away with and you can hot swap USB devices to your hearts content. Something I keep forgetting in the other 2 and get shouty error messages.

So - today I got a new webcam... well I say new, it was off a guy at work, for a 5er and came with no box or CD what so ever. So I figured I'd have to go hunting for some drivers.... wrong.

Plugged it into Vista - it saw it was logitech and went to their site (all in the background while I was working) found the driver, even found the support software and IM pluggins, installed the lot, was working about 2 minuets later! Fantastic.

Tried the same feat on Linux however... oh dear. 

Didn't even mount the USB device at all, rebooted with it attached and it could see it in a shell having typed 'lsusb' but couldnt do anything with it. No problem I throught - I'll just go to synaptic and type Logitech Driver... no... no results... webcam?... no.

right - ubuntu support forums it was then. after several cmd line sollutions and a few downloads, it still dosn't work.

Linux it seems is 100% Plug'n'FAIL! compatable.