Re: [MLUG] scanner

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> OK, (go ahead and laugh .... really; it's ok); but, ... how do you write
> a driver?
> 
> Do you write it with C++, or Perl, or .....whatever?
> 
> Please explain this in very simple terms.  :-)

That could be a very complicated explanation and it all depends on your 
device. Usually with Linux you'd write the driver in C if you wanted it 
to be included in the Linux kernel. You could write it in any language 
you wanted if you didn't want or need it to be in the kernel.. for 
example to write a scanner driver you might access the scanner through a 
generic USB (or whatever it uses) driver and just handle the scanner's 
specific stuff in user space (non-kernel code). If you knew the specs 
then doing the driver in user space wouldn't be that hard especially if 
you used something like Perl or Python. Without them it could be a lot 
harder. Of course once you get the driver worked out in user space you 
could always rewrite it in C as a kernel module which would give you the 
increased speed etc of kernel space. For the most part drivers are just 
communications protocols so it's often send/response type stuff.. which 
isn't to difficult in itself.


-- 
So long and thanks for all the fish.

Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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