On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:04:02 -0400, Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:

  

While reinventing the wheel is never a task to be undertaken lightly, perhaps another wrapper project - open source - would be the best way to go? What would it take? Who would be interested to step up to the plate either with financial support (for test equipment, etc.) or with programming talent?
    

I'm pretty quiet these days, but I think wrappers for Windows drivers is/was a bad move even with the underlying stuff that IBM and the ODIN has given OS/2. There are fundamental things in there that can't be changed because they are IBM's, so ugly Win3.1 file management icons, etc are always going to be there. VISTA appears to be different again from XP in it's underlying code (even MS had a lack of drivers when it was released). We need to be able to use and take more direct advantage of the Linux open source drivers or non-open source Linux drivers and wrap those on our OS.   

GenMac is only one issue. What about other wireless devices such as USB or PCMCIA cards? What about Printers? What about display chips? Sound cards? We need a new ODIN project that allows us to wrap or easily mod Linux drivers. It needs to be as simple as EMX is, just a set of libraries added to the path or the project should be driven as a native conversion like the ALSA code base for sound cards was.

  

Bounty the additional code library or toolset to make this easier to do.

  

JMHO.