If I remember correctly as most of them were DSPs and need a driver to load a binary blob to work correctly. All of them had their own spin on the process. Most linux distros did not ship the blobs either. So you would have a bit of fun cracking it out of some random windows EXE just so you could put it somewhere the driver could reach it. It was worth the extra 20-50 bucks it would cost just to not buy one of those things and use it in linnx. Remember this was at a time when a bit of ram (1MB) would cost 100+ dollars. There was a reason they were cheap. They did not have enough hardware to run standalone and relied on the OS to do the loader work.