From all of us at OSNews, we'd like to wish you a happy and healthy new year. In honor of the new year, we'd like to ask you: what headlines do you expect to read in the tech world in 2008? Are you expecting iPhone rev2? Or maybe Vista SP1's success? Perhaps Hardy Heron's world domination? Will Google's Android swallow the cellphone market? Can Facebook continue to rule the roost in social networking? Tell us what you expect in the comments!
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Member since:2005-07-06
From time to time Linux development confuses me. Current Linux distros have GPU accelerated effects on the desktop. When I plug in an external hard drive, it works immediately, but when I add an additional internal hard drive, I still have to edit /etc/fstab manually.
When I switched the graphics card in my Linux PC a few weeks ago, I had to reconfigure Xorg from the command line, because the driver from the older graphic card failed to load (obviously, as it's different hardware). Xorg didn't load the "radeon" driver by itself, even though it was installed. At least it could have fallen back to the Vesa driver.
I'm experienced enough to use the CLI. For me it wasn't really a huge problem. But I wonder about the development priorities from the Linux distributors. Why do they pay people to write compiz etc. to produce eye candy effects, when changing/adding internal hardware components is still a bitch? Do they think that eye candy is more important to common users than getting a system to work? Do they think that common users never change internal hardware after the initial Linux installation that it isn't needed to use the hardware detection techniques used during installation at a later time?
AFAIK many operating systems work like this: During boot a small program launches to check if the hardware configuration changed. If yes, the best driver on the system is loaded and the new hardware configuration gets saved.
To be fair, I didn't try every Linux distribution out there. I did, however, made above experiences with current releases of Ubuntu (7.10) and openSUSE (10.3).
My personal "year of the linux desktop" will be the year when fstab and xorg.conf are no longer needed.
Member since:2007-10-26
I did the ATI->NVIDIA switch recently too. It stuffs up Linux something bad.
I don't know why X.org doesn't scan lspci and then load drivers for the cards it find there but only if it detects that the hardware actually has changed. There are two conflicting things here. One is that autodetection overwrites most peoples settings but then again if those settings are wrong it doesn't matter. The system needs to be a better judge on which of the settings need to be changed and when.
Ubuntu supposedly has this safe-mode that activates the third time X.org fails to load but you cannot reliably change your video settings from there it stuffs up the X.org file. You can however load your desktop from that point.
It would be nice if X.org could become more dynamic and switch video systems without needing to be reloaded. I'm sure someone is working on all this stuff.
Member since:2006-10-28
Member since:
2005-08-06
Every year is a bit more the year of the Linux desktop. I realize that when my barber knows what I'm talking of when I tell him I use Linux as my main OS on my two PCs. And my barber is not at all a computer nerd like I am. He's just a normal citizen who's telling more and more people are becoming aware of the presence of Linux.
Now, if 2008 is going to revolutionize the Linux presence on desktop computers, I don't know, we'll see :-)