10 ms·

Getting Drivers for Old Hardware Is Harder Than Ever

95 points by edward 7y ago

grandinj 7y ago
Isn't this where Linux excels?
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  It seems a lot of the examples are about BIOS and other types of firmware, though. I'm not sure if Linux would be much help with that.
- privateprofile 7y ago
  Not sure if Linux excels on this globally, but I have an elderly relative doing all their email, web browsing and basic docs on a 2003 IBM Thinkpad running Lubuntu 16.04, with basically zero issues. Everything, including the old ATI X300 graphics card, worked out of the box. I also have a younger relative using a 2008 Dell d630 for all his schoolwork, running Ubuntu 16.04. Again, the old Nvidia Quadro worked out of the box.
- snvzz 7y ago
  Netbsd doesn't disappoint either.
- m463 7y ago
  As long as folks still maintain those i386 distributions... On the other hand, if your old hardware is used for games, there's probably some game emulator to help :)
- pmontra 7y ago
  I scanned a document today with my Canon N607U from 1997 on Ubuntu 19.10. I still remember when I plugged it in into a Ubuntu 8.04 laptop in 2009 and Ubuntu told me nothing about it. Trained by years of Windows and countless popups and notifications I assumed it didn't work. I even looked for Linux drivers then I tried the OS scanner program: the driver was already in the kernel and the scanner was working, no need to bother me with messages. I never had problems with anything else (printers, webcams, etc). On the sad side, my laptop from 2006 is still working (actually it's resting in a drawer most of the time) but it can't use a kernel more recent than some old 3.x version because anything newer won't support its ATI X1600 graphic card. I should try to boot it from a 19.10 USB stick but I'm not confident that somebody bothered to readd support for something that was dropped along the way.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    There isn't much point to running the most recent kernel on such old hardware anyways. You could try if current Ubuntu still works with old 3.x kernels. It might just do, systemd would be the most likely offender to stop the show I guess. But if 3.19 still supports your ATI, you even got yourself a kernel that's still under LTS. Just in case you need a silly project for the holiday season...
  - happycube 7y ago
    Can't guarantee it for laptops (unless it's something common like a Thinkpad T60), but I bet there's a free driver for the X1600 in 19.04. The proprietary ones from AMD have long been unsupported on the 1600 tho.
    - pmontra 7y ago
      I googled and it seems that a patch has landed in 18.04 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1791312 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1791312 I'll give it a try. Thank you!
- rini17 7y ago
  Not really, there's no stable in-kernel driver API/ABI, so unmaintained drivers get broken quickly.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    On the other hand, I've been able to get some unsupported stuff working by changing something like VID/PID in an existing driver. Not straightforward, but at least it can be done.
- jchw 7y ago
  Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that. I just booted the latest version of ArchLinux32 on a Wyse Cx0 thin client, which I believe runs a Via C7. It certainly wasn’t high end hardware for the time, being a thin client; had to reduce the framebuffer allocation in BIOS to have enough RAM to boot, but it works, and there’s even active driver development for the GPU with the OpenChrome project. Of course if you need proprietary or old out of tree modules the story gets worse, but most interesting hardware I’ve plugged in works without me needing to worry about the details, in my experience.
  - Decade 7y ago
    It’s getting more difficult to run 32-bit x86. The main Arch Linux dropped official support in 2017, Ubuntu dropped it in 2018, Fedora in 2019. Mint is good for old hardware, but they intend to drop 32-bit in 2020. There are LTS releases committed to supporting the 32-bit OS for several years to come, but the writing is on the wall: They have entered the long twilight of no official support, but still working if you can hack it together.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  If the driver isn't mainlined, you're entirely dependent on the whoever wrote the driver to update it for new kernel versions that break the old driver API and ABI.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- moonbug 7y ago
  ahaha. yes, but probably not in the direction you mean.
- shortformblog 7y ago
  Author here. Yes, but it’s not universal—the Connectix Quickcam I cite in the piece did not work, but I’m sure that’s a result of its age and its use of a mixture of parallel and PS/2 ports. (It did pass through on KVM, though, but I couldn’t get it to start!)
Havoc 7y ago
Quite a hostile move by Intel. Just throw it on a separate archive domain, plaster the thing full of scary legal disclaimers and call it a day
ggerules 7y ago
I wonder if this would help. https://web.archive.org/web/*/hardware%20drivers https://web.archive.org/web/*/hardware%20drivers
- aylons 7y ago
  Well, it is literally in the article's first sentence.
lallysingh 7y ago
Can't you run the old OS in a VM and pass-through the connections you need?
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Only if you can actually obtain the old drivers.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I do this a lot (old test equipment) and have about a 50% success rate. There are many corners of ethernet, RS232, etc that aren't emulated very well by the virtual hardware. Timings, side-channels, and permissions are the major offenders. Permissions especially compound the problem because host security mechanisms intentionally override VM security mechanisms. For instance, last weekend I had to figure out how to get RARP packets through the windows firewall, and even though I eventually got the setup working the complexity was not encapsulated by the virtual machine abstraction.
- shortformblog 7y ago
  Author here: I actually tried doing this with the Connectix Quickcam I cite in the piece, basically as a stress test. No luck, though. https://tedium.co/2019/07/16/connectix-quickcam-history/ https://tedium.co/2019/07/16/connectix-quickcam-history/
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
This isn't quite the same thing, but can I talk about something related? For the past month, I've been on a bit of a quest to downgrade my my life to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which came out in 2013. It's something I've wanted to do for years, for a variety of personal reasons, and it should be able to do everything I need. My primary issue has not been software compatibility per se, but actually obtaining the software I need. The trial version of NetNewsWire 4 looks beautiful on my Mavericks install, but I can't buy a license key because BlackPixel no longer sells them. Ditto for Scapple, and Day One, and Parallels, and many others. I had to hunt through the Internet Archive to find the last compatible versions of Intel Power Gadget and Kaleidoscope. I had to manually download and test each version to figure out where they dropped compatibility. These are all fully offline apps, so there's no reason I shouldn't be able to buy and download old versions. I'm not asking for support or development time—I totally expect to be on my own—but please, developers, just give me a way to obtain what you previously created.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  Yeah "what's the last version that runs on X" is a tough question in many cases, even old Windows versions. In case you run a blog or are member of some public forum, news group or anything that's indexed by search engines consider dumping your findings there. Someone might try to do the same in a decade or so. For your license key issue, did you try to just contact the vendors? Maybe some are even willing to make these old versions free now, they might just not have seen the point in it...
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    I definitely need to do a larger writeup somewhere when I'm "done" with this project. > For your license key issue, did you try to just contact the vendors? Yes, I have! I've received some very nice responses, but none that actually helped. Which I kind of get, I guess, but it feels like this shouldn't happen. Where possible, I've actually turned to pirating stuff—I normally hate doing this, but if you're not going to sell to me, I don't think it's wrong for me to find another way. I finally found a copy of NetNewsWire this way, after a lot of searching. P.S. This isn't an offline app, but shoutouts to Bitwarden for the stupidest problem. The old version of their desktop app keeps helpfully replacing itself with the newer, incompatible version, which then won't open. If I mark the app read-only, Bitwarden just endlessly asks for my admin password.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
I sympathize for folks wanting to run old hardware for nostalgia purposes. However, anything older than twenty years can typically be replaced by a low-end Rasberry PI and use a lot less electricity doing it. The drop in the cost of hardware after 2k makes repurposing less useful then it was previously.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  1. It's not just CPUs and GPUs. The article talks about trying to find drivers for a Webcam. 2. Some of the BIOS's being removed by Intel are only six years old.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Sure, though those are affected by the drop in hardware costs too. Just checked Amazon, $27 for a 1080p webcam. That's probably cheaper and less stressful than an IT person burning an hour on a driver search with random results.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Yeah, but they'll harm the environment in the process. With processors, the environmental impact is probably a wash when you consider energy use, but that doesn't apply to other types of hardware. It would also be nice if tracking down an old driver didn't require an hour of work...
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Related HN discussion from a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563309

95 points by edward 7y ago

grandinj 7y ago

Isn't this where Linux excels?

CharlesColeman 7y ago
It seems a lot of the examples are about BIOS and other types of firmware, though. I'm not sure if Linux would be much help with that.
privateprofile 7y ago
Not sure if Linux excels on this globally, but I have an elderly relative doing all their email, web browsing and basic docs on a 2003 IBM Thinkpad running Lubuntu 16.04, with basically zero issues. Everything, including the old ATI X300 graphics card, worked out of the box. I also have a younger relative using a 2008 Dell d630 for all his schoolwork, running Ubuntu 16.04. Again, the old Nvidia Quadro worked out of the box.
snvzz 7y ago
Netbsd doesn't disappoint either.
m463 7y ago
As long as folks still maintain those i386 distributions... On the other hand, if your old hardware is used for games, there's probably some game emulator to help :)
pmontra 7y ago
I scanned a document today with my Canon N607U from 1997 on Ubuntu 19.10. I still remember when I plugged it in into a Ubuntu 8.04 laptop in 2009 and Ubuntu told me nothing about it. Trained by years of Windows and countless popups and notifications I assumed it didn't work. I even looked for Linux drivers then I tried the OS scanner program: the driver was already in the kernel and the scanner was working, no need to bother me with messages. I never had problems with anything else (printers, webcams, etc). On the sad side, my laptop from 2006 is still working (actually it's resting in a drawer most of the time) but it can't use a kernel more recent than some old 3.x version because anything newer won't support its ATI X1600 graphic card. I should try to boot it from a 19.10 USB stick but I'm not confident that somebody bothered to readd support for something that was dropped along the way.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  There isn't much point to running the most recent kernel on such old hardware anyways. You could try if current Ubuntu still works with old 3.x kernels. It might just do, systemd would be the most likely offender to stop the show I guess. But if 3.19 still supports your ATI, you even got yourself a kernel that's still under LTS. Just in case you need a silly project for the holiday season...
- happycube 7y ago
  Can't guarantee it for laptops (unless it's something common like a Thinkpad T60), but I bet there's a free driver for the X1600 in 19.04. The proprietary ones from AMD have long been unsupported on the 1600 tho.
  - pmontra 7y ago
    I googled and it seems that a patch has landed in 18.04 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1791312 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1791312 I'll give it a try. Thank you!
rini17 7y ago
Not really, there's no stable in-kernel driver API/ABI, so unmaintained drivers get broken quickly.
- tyingq 7y ago
  On the other hand, I've been able to get some unsupported stuff working by changing something like VID/PID in an existing driver. Not straightforward, but at least it can be done.
jchw 7y ago
Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that. I just booted the latest version of ArchLinux32 on a Wyse Cx0 thin client, which I believe runs a Via C7. It certainly wasn’t high end hardware for the time, being a thin client; had to reduce the framebuffer allocation in BIOS to have enough RAM to boot, but it works, and there’s even active driver development for the GPU with the OpenChrome project. Of course if you need proprietary or old out of tree modules the story gets worse, but most interesting hardware I’ve plugged in works without me needing to worry about the details, in my experience.
- Decade 7y ago
  It’s getting more difficult to run 32-bit x86. The main Arch Linux dropped official support in 2017, Ubuntu dropped it in 2018, Fedora in 2019. Mint is good for old hardware, but they intend to drop 32-bit in 2020. There are LTS releases committed to supporting the 32-bit OS for several years to come, but the writing is on the wall: They have entered the long twilight of no official support, but still working if you can hack it together.
heavyset_go 7y ago
If the driver isn't mainlined, you're entirely dependent on the whoever wrote the driver to update it for new kernel versions that break the old driver API and ABI.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
moonbug 7y ago
ahaha. yes, but probably not in the direction you mean.
shortformblog 7y ago
Author here. Yes, but it’s not universal—the Connectix Quickcam I cite in the piece did not work, but I’m sure that’s a result of its age and its use of a mixture of parallel and PS/2 ports. (It did pass through on KVM, though, but I couldn’t get it to start!)

Havoc 7y ago

Quite a hostile move by Intel. Just throw it on a separate archive domain, plaster the thing full of scary legal disclaimers and call it a day

ggerules 7y ago

I wonder if this would help. https://web.archive.org/web/*/hardware%20drivers https://web.archive.org/web/*/hardware%20drivers

aylons 7y ago
Well, it is literally in the article's first sentence.

lallysingh 7y ago

Can't you run the old OS in a VM and pass-through the connections you need?

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Only if you can actually obtain the old drivers.
jjoonathan 7y ago
I do this a lot (old test equipment) and have about a 50% success rate. There are many corners of ethernet, RS232, etc that aren't emulated very well by the virtual hardware. Timings, side-channels, and permissions are the major offenders. Permissions especially compound the problem because host security mechanisms intentionally override VM security mechanisms. For instance, last weekend I had to figure out how to get RARP packets through the windows firewall, and even though I eventually got the setup working the complexity was not encapsulated by the virtual machine abstraction.
shortformblog 7y ago
Author here: I actually tried doing this with the Connectix Quickcam I cite in the piece, basically as a stress test. No luck, though. https://tedium.co/2019/07/16/connectix-quickcam-history/ https://tedium.co/2019/07/16/connectix-quickcam-history/

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

This isn't quite the same thing, but can I talk about something related? For the past month, I've been on a bit of a quest to downgrade my my life to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which came out in 2013. It's something I've wanted to do for years, for a variety of personal reasons, and it should be able to do everything I need. My primary issue has not been software compatibility per se, but actually obtaining the software I need. The trial version of NetNewsWire 4 looks beautiful on my Mavericks install, but I can't buy a license key because BlackPixel no longer sells them. Ditto for Scapple, and Day One, and Parallels, and many others. I had to hunt through the Internet Archive to find the last compatible versions of Intel Power Gadget and Kaleidoscope. I had to manually download and test each version to figure out where they dropped compatibility. These are all fully offline apps, so there's no reason I shouldn't be able to buy and download old versions. I'm not asking for support or development time—I totally expect to be on my own—but please, developers, just give me a way to obtain what you previously created.

iforgotpassword 7y ago
Yeah "what's the last version that runs on X" is a tough question in many cases, even old Windows versions. In case you run a blog or are member of some public forum, news group or anything that's indexed by search engines consider dumping your findings there. Someone might try to do the same in a decade or so. For your license key issue, did you try to just contact the vendors? Maybe some are even willing to make these old versions free now, they might just not have seen the point in it...
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I definitely need to do a larger writeup somewhere when I'm "done" with this project. > For your license key issue, did you try to just contact the vendors? Yes, I have! I've received some very nice responses, but none that actually helped. Which I kind of get, I guess, but it feels like this shouldn't happen. Where possible, I've actually turned to pirating stuff—I normally hate doing this, but if you're not going to sell to me, I don't think it's wrong for me to find another way. I finally found a copy of NetNewsWire this way, after a lot of searching. P.S. This isn't an offline app, but shoutouts to Bitwarden for the stupidest problem. The old version of their desktop app keeps helpfully replacing itself with the newer, incompatible version, which then won't open. If I mark the app read-only, Bitwarden just endlessly asks for my admin password.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

I sympathize for folks wanting to run old hardware for nostalgia purposes. However, anything older than twenty years can typically be replaced by a low-end Rasberry PI and use a lot less electricity doing it. The drop in the cost of hardware after 2k makes repurposing less useful then it was previously.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
1. It's not just CPUs and GPUs. The article talks about trying to find drivers for a Webcam. 2. Some of the BIOS's being removed by Intel are only six years old.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Sure, though those are affected by the drop in hardware costs too. Just checked Amazon, $27 for a 1080p webcam. That's probably cheaper and less stressful than an IT person burning an hour on a driver search with random results.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Yeah, but they'll harm the environment in the process. With processors, the environmental impact is probably a wash when you consider energy use, but that doesn't apply to other types of hardware. It would also be nice if tracking down an old driver didn't require an hour of work...

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Related HN discussion from a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563309