Talk:Accessories
From AlwaysInnovating
This page is useless
What's the point of listing RT3070 with question marks? It's shipped with the TouchBook and it obviously works in the TouchBook OS. Whether it works on Ubuntu or Android is just a matter of whether you download the driver source code and build it or not. If you're using a 2.6.31 kernel or newer you don't even have to download anything, the rt3070 driver is in the mainline already (as a staging driver). And for the record, the staging code works on the TouchBook too.
What's the point of listing any other wifi devices? How many wifi interfaces are you planning to plug in, isn't one enough for a device of this type?
This whole page is rather pointless; even for the devices that are interesting it doesn't provide enough information to be useful. There's two important questions to answer, for any given device - what Linux kernel version is required to have a working driver, and are there any weird hardware quirks that prevent the device from working with the TouchBook even when the proper driver is available. Neither of these two points are present on this page.
For the most part, USB is USB. If a Linux driver exists for the device, it will probably work. The exceptions are devices that require too much power from the USB port, and devices that don't actually have a proper Linux driver. As an example of the former, I have a Hitachi 7200RPM 2.5" laptop hard drive that doesn't work when plugged into a bus-powered USB-SATA adapter. It needs more power than a single USB port can provide. But that's not particular to the TouchBook, that's true for any machine with standard USB port. The drive just needs more power than the USB spec allows. It's not worth mentioning that here because there's nothing unusual about this fact.
As an example of the latter, some network devices that are lacking a Linux driver, and are made to work on X86 machines using ndis_wrapper and the Windows driver. Obviously since the TouchBook does not execute X86 code it cannot use an X86 Windows driver, ndis_wrapper or not. Again, it's not worth mentioning, because there's nothing unusual about it.
If anyone actually runs into a device that has a Linux driver but doesn't work on the TouchBook, that would surely be worth knowing about and worth posting here. But for the moment, this page is essentially content-free noise. Hyc 01:47, 2 October 2009 (PDT)
