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Wow that's so much easier

Workshopshed

I was clearing through some old paperwork and found a letter to the company who's manufactured my computer stating that they were enclosing a driver disk for my CDRom drive. This brought back memories of my first attempts at installing Linux based software on my machine using floppy disks and configuration files. Late nights and lots of swearing.

 

Flash forward to last weekend. I plugged in a USB keyboard and Wifi dongle into a hub connected to my Pi Zero and booted it up. They just worked, no need to install drivers, no need for cryptic configuration filles. Not tried out the Ethernet that's built into my hub yet but I'd be surprised if that did not just work too.

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  • My favorite word in technological discussions... "just".  Just works, just fix it, just add that, whatever form it takes.  Just because you don't need to do any additional configuration, doesn't mean those files of old weren't necessary or added in. The truth of the matter is, someone, or some people, in the open source community did a mountain of work to automate the process of configuring devices like USB for mouse and keyboard, wireless, or for that matter, network, and dhcp.

     

    Truth is, we are resting on the shoulders of giants. The people who have sat on all those standards committees working out the best and easiest way to implement numerous technologies. All the while fighting against large corporation special interest wanting to make open technology into a proprietary only submission. The fight continues, and we should not rest on the shoulders, but instead continue to push back to keep open source free (like freedom, not free beer).

     

    The Raspberry Pi group has done a phenomenal job developing Raspbain, and the hardware in all the releases of the Pi platform, so people everywhere can plug them into their network, hook them up to their tv, plug in a mouse and keyboard, add power, and have it "JUST WORK!!!"

     

    Three cheers for the development teams,

    Jack

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  • My favorite word in technological discussions... "just".  Just works, just fix it, just add that, whatever form it takes.  Just because you don't need to do any additional configuration, doesn't mean those files of old weren't necessary or added in. The truth of the matter is, someone, or some people, in the open source community did a mountain of work to automate the process of configuring devices like USB for mouse and keyboard, wireless, or for that matter, network, and dhcp.

     

    Truth is, we are resting on the shoulders of giants. The people who have sat on all those standards committees working out the best and easiest way to implement numerous technologies. All the while fighting against large corporation special interest wanting to make open technology into a proprietary only submission. The fight continues, and we should not rest on the shoulders, but instead continue to push back to keep open source free (like freedom, not free beer).

     

    The Raspberry Pi group has done a phenomenal job developing Raspbain, and the hardware in all the releases of the Pi platform, so people everywhere can plug them into their network, hook them up to their tv, plug in a mouse and keyboard, add power, and have it "JUST WORK!!!"

     

    Three cheers for the development teams,

    Jack

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