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Homepage: http://linuxhelp.150m.com/ A number of weeks back, www.freshnews.org pointed me to Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement of the release of the first edition of "The Linux Device Driver Kit."
Have you ever felt teased when driver developers of other operating systems teased you about a lack of a "proper" driver development kit for Linux? Have you felt left out of the crowd when looking at the 36 cdrom package of documentation and example source code that other operating systems provide for their developers? Well feel ashamed no longer! In coordination with the FreedomHEC conference this week in Seattle, WA, USA, I'm proud to announce the first release of the Linux Device Driver Kit. It is a cd image that contains everything that a Linux device driver author would need in order to create Linux drivers, including a full copy of the O'Reilly book, "Linux Device Drivers, third edition" and pre-built copies of all of the in-kernel docbook documentation for easy browsing. It even has a copy of the Linux source code that you can directly build external kernel modules against. It can be downloaded for free here. (By the way, the reason I now use www.freshnews.org, rather than linuxtoday.com, for linux news, is, that linuxtoday.com continually censored my contributions to their site.) I thought to myself, this sounds good, and downloaded the 92 MB file from www.kernel.org. After unzipping the iso file and mounting it as a filesystem in the usual way, I started browsing the directories to see what was there. After opening page after page of nearly empty HTML files, I though to myself; This is a bad JOKE. Then, I stumbled across the third edition of Linux Device Drivers. After opening the PDF files in Firefox, I realized that I had finally found something of value. Although not my favorite format, PDF files are still useful and provide excellent quality printout (for those wishing to print out the 600, or so, pages). However, every page with an image (other than the chapter headers) showed for a short time, then whited out. I checked for this strange behavior in Konqueror, with the same results. So, how could one view these whited out pages? This led me to consider reformatting the book as a web-page. So, I ran it through a customized pdftohtml, and spent a week cleaning up the results. This may have been overkill, but it sure solved the whited out pages problem. You can download Linux Device Drivers 3 (the entire book in HTML format) from here or here (0.9 MB). Right click on the link and choose "Save as" from the menu. Unpack the archive with the command tar -xf LDD3.tar.bz2 Or, you can view the book as one large (2.5 MB) HTML page, by clicking here. To help save bandwidth, it is best to download the bzipped version. By the way, if you wish to list the contents of compressed archive files, use the commands: tar -tf LDD3.tar.bz2 (works for both gzipped and bzipped files) Linux Device Drivers 3 is available under the Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike" license, Version 2.0:
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
You are free:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license). The HTML page, being a derivative work, must be released under the same license. If you redistribute the HTML page version of Linux Device Drivers 3, then you must attribute it to the original authors (of course) and also to the website http://linuxhelp.150m.com. In particular, you must not remove the link to http://linux.coconia.net/ that is at the top of the page. |