
Getting Drivers for Old Hardware Is Harder Than Ever - edward
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a88z3/getting-drivers-for-old-hardware-is-harder-than-ever
======
Wowfunhappy
This isn't quite the same thing, but can I talk about something related?

For the past month, I've been on a bit of a quest to downgrade my my life to
OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which came out in 2013. It's something I've wanted to do
for years, for a variety of personal reasons, and it should be able to do
everything I need.

My primary issue has not been software compatibility per se, but actually
obtaining the software I need. The trial version of NetNewsWire 4 looks
beautiful on my Mavericks install, but I can't buy a license key because
BlackPixel no longer sells them. Ditto for Scapple, and Day One, and
Parallels, and many others.

I had to hunt through the Internet Archive to find the last compatible
versions of Intel Power Gadget and Kaleidoscope. I had to manually download
and test each version to figure out where they dropped compatibility.

These are all fully offline apps, so there's no reason I shouldn't be able to
buy and download old versions. I'm not asking for support or development
time—I totally expect to be on my own—but please, developers, just give me a
way to obtain what you previously created.

~~~
jtreminio
I've got an original iPad and an iPad Air (I think 2nd gen).

Both still have great battery life and screens are still responsive ... but I
made the mistake of wiping both to give as gifts for some nieces in El
Salvador, and you can't actually install anything on them anymore.

They come with Safari and the other baked-in Apple apps, but that's it. None
of the most common apps in their store have versions available for the iOS
version the devices are limited to.

What the hell am I supposed to do with two fully functional (hardware-wise)
devices?

~~~
homarp
if you have an existing account that downloaded a particular app already, you
can download the old version of an app. [https://support.apple.com/en-
ca/HT201377](https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201377)

or you jailbreak...

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Another tip:

If the same app is still available on the store, but the newest version isn't
compatible with your old OS, you won't be able to buy the that app on your old
OS.

 _However_ , if you can log into the same Apple account on a new OS, you can
buy the app there (pressing "get" on a free app counts as buying for our
purposes). Once purchased, you'll be able to install the last compatible
version on your old device.

This also works on the Mac App Store.

Beware of situations where what's currently available on the store isn't
actually the same app. If the developer released a new version as a separate
app at one point, this process won't work.

------
mixmastamyk
I sympathize for folks wanting to run old hardware for nostalgia purposes.
However, anything older than twenty years can typically be replaced by a low-
end Rasberry PI and use a lot less electricity doing it.

The drop in the cost of hardware after 2k makes repurposing less useful then
it was previously.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
1\. It's not just CPUs and GPUs. The article talks about trying to find
drivers for a Webcam.

2\. Some of the BIOS's being removed by Intel are only six years old.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Sure, though those are affected by the drop in hardware costs too. Just
checked Amazon, $27 for a 1080p webcam. That's probably cheaper and less
stressful than an IT person burning an hour on a driver search with random
results.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Yeah, but they'll harm the environment in the process. With processors, the
environmental impact is probably a wash when you consider energy use, but that
doesn't apply to other types of hardware.

It would also be nice if tracking down an old driver _didn 't_ require an hour
of work...

------
grandinj
Isn't this where Linux excels?

~~~
pmontra
I scanned a document today with my Canon N607U from 1997 on Ubuntu 19.10.

I still remember when I plugged it in into a Ubuntu 8.04 laptop in 2009 and
Ubuntu told me nothing about it. Trained by years of Windows and countless
popups and notifications I assumed it didn't work. I even looked for Linux
drivers then I tried the OS scanner program: the driver was already in the
kernel and the scanner was working, no need to bother me with messages. I
never had problems with anything else (printers, webcams, etc).

On the sad side, my laptop from 2006 is still working (actually it's resting
in a drawer most of the time) but it can't use a kernel more recent than some
old 3.x version because anything newer won't support its ATI X1600 graphic
card. I should try to boot it from a 19.10 USB stick but I'm not confident
that somebody bothered to readd support for something that was dropped along
the way.

~~~
happycube
Can't guarantee it for laptops (unless it's something common like a Thinkpad
T60), but I bet there's a free driver for the X1600 in 19.04. The proprietary
ones from AMD have long been unsupported on the 1600 tho.

~~~
pmontra
I googled and it seems that a patch has landed in 18.04

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1791312](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1791312)

I'll give it a try. Thank you!

------
ggerules
I wonder if this would help.

[https://web.archive.org/web/*/hardware%20drivers](https://web.archive.org/web/*/hardware%20drivers)

~~~
aylons
Well, it is literally in the article's first sentence.

------
Wowfunhappy
Related HN discussion from a couple weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563309)

------
Havoc
Quite a hostile move by Intel.

Just throw it on a separate archive domain, plaster the thing full of scary
legal disclaimers and call it a day

------
lallysingh
Can't you run the old OS in a VM and pass-through the connections you need?

~~~
jjoonathan
I do this a lot (old test equipment) and have about a 50% success rate. There
are many corners of ethernet, RS232, etc that aren't emulated very well by the
virtual hardware. Timings, side-channels, and permissions are the major
offenders. Permissions especially compound the problem because host security
mechanisms intentionally override VM security mechanisms.

For instance, last weekend I had to figure out how to get RARP packets through
the windows firewall, and even though I eventually got the setup working the
complexity was not encapsulated by the virtual machine abstraction.

