Sometime Today, Rony Bill assembled some asciibets to say:
The reason for writing this mail is not to find out what went wrong but to suggest to the kernel writers that just like the Windows OS, Linux too could have a streamlined and simple method of installing device drivers.
I won't tell you why it isn't that easy. All I'll tell you is this:
Windows is one system. There is only one system architecture on which it will work. There is only one set of APIs that it provides. You are guaranteed that no matter what the user has installed, a basic set of APIs, including GUI APIs are available.
On linux, this is not the case. You cannot even assume that people have keyboards, monitors and mice. A system will work perfectly with no console I/O devices. Even if these do exist, one cannot assume that the APIs that you want exist. It just isn't possible to write code that will run everywhere seamlessly as a binary. Providing source code means that people will build whatever application they need against their current set of APIs based on their current capabilities.
That said, what's wrong with "rpm -i driver-version.architecture.rpm"? Drivers are already provided in this fashion. IBM just didn't provide it.
Philip