[NCLUG] Good news from the hardware front

Brian Wood bwood at beww.org
Fri Mar 21 14:16:56 MDT 2008


On Mar 20, 2008, at 6:49 PM, Grant Johnson wrote:
> Well, I noticed that Big Lots was selling a 1G USB thumbdrive for  
> $8, and I was there any way to buy some Easter candy.  Now you may  
> wonder why I am even bothering to mention this here.
>
> It is made by Kingston, and while they are respectable, that is  
> still no reason to mention it.
>
> The reason I mention it is that on the back, the supported OS's are  
> listed as Windows Vista, 2000 SP3, XP SP1, Mac OS 10.x and above,  
> and ....    Linux 2.4 and above.
>
> Maybe some people are actually noticing that we buy stuff, and if it  
> does generic USB mass storage, they don't need drivers, and that  
> printing that little acknowledgment there costs them almost nothing.
>
> I hope more people buy their products because of this.

I have more than once gone out of my way to make sure a vendor knows I  
purchased their product because of Linux support, or even just their  
attitude towards OSS in general.

I hope this doesn't backfire on Kingston. Most of us understand that  
any USB drive will work with Linux, and that it might have to be  
manually mounted etc.

But some will not, and if they start getting support phone calls from  
Linux newbies they may re-think their support listing.

Fortunately the USB support is Linux is a lot better than it used to  
be, and most of the distros being used by newbies will auto-mount  
drives.

Maybe they should say something like "for Linux support go to..." and  
give a decent web site. Linux users are, or at least should be, used  
to going to the net for support.

beww




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