OpenBSD Journal

Welcome to another new driver - mbg(4)

Contributed by deanna on from the nice drivers, nice vendors dept.

Marc Balmer (mbalmer@) recently added mbg(4), a driver for Meinberg Funkuhren time signal station receivers. Though all new drivers are worth mentioning (and we have stories in the works about a few more) Meinberg Funkuhren's manner of dealing with OpenBSD is worth a special note.

From the cvs log message:

I have to mention the outstanding support from Meinberg, not only did they give me the hardware, docs, and reference source code, but they even call me back to explain the details of their hardware to me. If only the wireless manufacturors were that cooperative...

So here is another good vendor to keep in mind when buying new hardware.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Marc Balmer (213.189.137.178) on

    ... and for the sake of completeness, here is the URL of Meinberg Funkuhren: http://www.meinberg.de/.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (216.220.225.229) on

    How much for the least expensive one?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (81.241.250.213) on

      Don't know about the least expensive one... I only found a quote for ca. 400 Euro at https://connect.computacenter.de/Catalogue/ProductList.asp?pt=020&sc=CC00000001&Sortcode2=001&man=Meinberg

  3. By Chris Snell (66.29.164.42) on http://chrissnell.com

    Thank you, mbalmer and Meinberg Funkuhren. I've been looking for time synchronization hardware for a while now. DCF77 won't work for us here in the United States but this company has a lot of other interesting products that may work for us. I've sent a request to MF for a price list and ordering information.

    Manufacturers: I'm in charge of IT purchasing for a 400-employe online retailer. When the OpenBSD project supports a piece of hardware, that means a lot to me. That gives me warm and fuzzy feelings about your hardware and I know that product is most likely I'll have a solid, reliable driver for it. Over the last twelve months, we've spent over US$400,000 on OpenBSD-friendly hardware. Blessing by the OpenBSD project is the gold standard for me when choosing hardware configurations; if your company is not providing documentation to these guys, you're missing out!

    Chris

    Comments

    1. By Marc Balmer (213.189.137.178) on

      The mbg(4) driver will soon be extended to support a GPS PCI card from Meinberg (I am eagerly waiting for it to arrive...). If you want to support our effort to make precise time available, consider donating one of their newer PCI based DCF77 receiver cards (even if you can't make use of them yourself, many people in Europe could).

    2. By Anonymous Coward (83.5.246.175) on


      My guess is that smaller manufacturers, or those making specialized equipment, would tend to be more receptive to free software needs.

      Unfortunately, it would seem that a sense of responsability, or simply pride in one's product, gets severely diluted in the miasma of management methodology.

      It's sad really because everyone stands to gain if everyone plays ball.

      Customers have better working hardware on more platforms, companies make more sales, have less support to provide and drivers to write, a win-win scenario ih PHB-speak. All it takes is mailing out some docs and hardware and voilą.

      So, if you're a smaller company wishing to make inroads into the market, be nice to FOSS developers and remember that Apple started in a garage catering to the hobbyist market. And if you do become the next Apple, don't forget what got you there in the first place...

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (155.212.34.122) on

        > And if you do become the next Apple, don't forget what got you there in the first place...

        You mean like Apple did?

Latest Articles

Credits

Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]