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.

and all attendees of FreedomHEC will get a physical copy, for you to leave around your desk for other developers to envy.

There's a few things that I would like to include in future versions of this cdrom:

• searchable index of all documentation. jsFind looks like will work for this, but due to time constraints, did not make this release.
• prettier web pages. I acknolodge I'm no designer, anyone who wants to fix up my sparse html with proper CSS support and images would be greatly appreciated.
• More documentation. Possible inclusion is a snapshot of the kernelnewbies wiki. As we have plenty of room, any pointers to stuff that should be included is welcome.

And of course, the image is released under the GPL v2 and can be copied freely. There's a cdrom label included in the root directory if you wish to print it out.

posted Wed, 24 May 2006 in [/linux]