Erm no. Code reviews occur. Independently. And quite often security patches come out saying that there's a fix for a potential vulnerability; but those who found it have no idea how it might be exploited.
That part is true. However, you don't need to know it all to see typical vulnerabilities. Quite often, it's the "usual misteaks".
And because Linux is very modular, vulnerabilities are usually isolated to particular functionality.
ndiswrapper is your friend.
And you've written to the manufacturer of the laptop letting them know that their Linux support sucks? Until people start doing that frequently, manufacturers will simply churn out the same old junk.
Seems to me like you found a hard way to do it. :-)
The only kernel recompile I've had to do recently was for an orphan CPU that's not properly detected. Windows runs on it in 486 mode. But it's closer to a P-III.
The thing is; I *could* recompile Linux for the specific processor.
Strangely enough, another version of Linux runs fine on the same system, correctly detecting the processor. When I get some time, I'll diff the source trees and find out why.
Again, I couldn't do that with Windows. Nor would there be the possibility of finding that one vendor's version of the same nominal kernel actually fixes something that the other's hasn't.
Car makers usually try to arrange for second-source on everything. It reduces the chance of production stopping and reduces the liability and damage if one supplier provides faulty parts that don't show for some years. -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign I'm a .signature virus! X against HTML mail Copy me into your ~-.signature and postings to help me spread!
