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Linux and its code are made by humans, and humans aren’t with us forever. Over the weekend, a short message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded people how much one person can mean to a seemingly huge project like Linux, and how quickly it can disappear.

Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list Friday evening:

This is to let you know that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.

LWN.net estimates that Finger, 84, has contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or a total of 1,464 commits, since at least kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes uncertain nature of kernel contributions, this is an impressive achievement in itself – especially for someone with no formal computer training and who fancied himself a scientist.

The Deepest Trenches: Linux Wi-Fi in the 2000s

That kind of effort is worth celebrating, regardless. But the space Finger has devoted himself to makes him a particularly patient and productive collaborator.

Getting Wi-Fi to work on a Linux machine when Finger started contributing was terrible. The odds of your hardware being recognized, activated, and working properly immediately after installation were similar to getting a straight flush in poker. If no one has gotten to your wireless chipset yet, you’ve used NDISwrapper, a Windows interface tool that both makes your Linux installation less open and still painful to install and maintain.

Finger began fixing this by working on Broadcom’s BCM43XX drivers. Broadcom didn’t provide code for its equipment, so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specifications by manually dumping and reading hardware registers. Along with the Broadcom drivers, Finger also provided Realtek drivers. Many commenters on blogs and message boards note that their systems still use parts of Finger’s code today.

Repairing mainframes, scientific equipment and RV resorts

Finger doesn’t have a large footprint on the web, beyond its hundreds of core commits. He has a page for DRAWxtl, for creating crystal structure drawings, on his personal domain, but no general personal page. Sometimes he answered questions on Quora. He had a GitHub profile showing more than 100 contributions to projects in 2024.

Perhaps the most information about Finger found in one place is a three-part series for Linux Journal, “Linux in a Windows Workstation Environment,” written in 2005, when he was approximately 65. He summarizes his experience: Fortran programmer in 1963, PDP-11 interface to scientific instruments in 1970, VAX-11/780 work in the early 1980s, then Unix/Linux systems, until his retirement from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington , DC, in 1999. The mineral Fingerite is named after Finger, whose work in crystallography led him to a fellowship in northern Bavaria, as noted in a Quora answer to Autobahn.

“At that time, I became a full-time RV resident dedicated to avoiding the cold weather,” Finger writes. He and his wife, Denise, arrived that year in a 55+ RV community in Mesa, Arizona. He joined the computer club, which had a growing number of Windows computers sharing a DSL connection through one of the systems running WinGate. A new RV resort owner wanted to expand to 22 workstations, but WinGate licenses for that many would be expensive for the club. Finger, who was “highly leery of using Windows 98 in a critical role,” got to work.

Finger continues through the series to describe the various ways he upgraded the routing and server capacity of the network, which grew to 38 user stations, Samba shares, a member database, VPN tunnels, several free RJ-45 ports, and “ Free Wi-Fi access… throughout the park.”

Passing it on

Many people have commented on the extensive work Finger has done to make Linux usable by more people. Several mention that Finger also mentored people, the kind of work that has an exponential effect. “MB” wrote on LWN.net that Finger “coached other people to get Broadcom’s open source code into the kernel. And I think it was a huge success. And that was just a small part of Larry’s success story.”

In a 2023 Quora answer to someone asking if someone without “any formal computer science training” could “contribute anything meaningful” to Linux, Finger wrote: “I think I have.” Finger links to the statistics for the 6.4 kernel, showing 172,346 lines of its code in it, roughly 0.5 percent of the total.

I never took computer science courses; however, I have considerable coding experience, much of which occurred when computers were much less powerful than today and it was critical to write code that worked efficiently.

Finger suggests in his response small fixes, reading the guidelines thoroughly and always using git’s send-email to send fixes: “Nothing will be taken down faster than a fix sent by mail like Thunderbird.” Finding typos and errors in comments and text strings can help, especially after translation. Finger advises being patient, expecting criticism about following rules and formats, and continuing to break away from it.

In another Quora answer about kernel driver development, Finger says, “This activity can be very rewarding and equally frustrating!” You should learn C, suggested Finger, and maybe start by analyzing USB drivers and spend time to learn about DMA.

“Don’t lose hope,” Finger wrote. “It took me about 2 years before I could do more than tell the experts where my system was generating an error.”