"One of the often cited reasons for not switching away from MS Windows is it's breadth of commodity hardware support. The argument often goes something like this: 'Since Windows supports all the hardware I have why would I want to risk it not working under Linux? It's better to continue to use what I know will work.' While that may be true in and of itself, I'm finding this argument to involve a limited outlook."
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Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
on a nice system i dont have to.
on a not so nice its a matter of getting the headers of the kernel im currently using and running ./configure;make;make install. then i modprobe the resulting module.
yes its a bit more "complex" then doubleclicking a exe and then hitting next a few times. but it rearly fails unless the driver is so old that it needs a total rewrite of the interface between kernel and driver.
and most likely, as the source, or atleast part of it, is available, someone else have done just that.
allso, failure to install the error is more likely to produce rich error messages that i can feed into say google to go look for fixes. windows often do a hal impressing (sorry i cant do that, (l)user) and thats that.
btw, cute nick. black metal and pertrol?
Edited 2005-11-11 00:25
Member since:2005-06-29
make
make install
What's so hard about that? As a prerequisite you need:
1.) A symbolic link in /usr/src/linux to your current running linux. You also need a /lib/modules/linux to your current linux modules.
2.) Of course, you'll need any "source" package for your version of linux (good distributions make these easily available, or just offer you no choice but to have them).
Now, some drivers aren't packaged with nice makefiles, but that's the ditributors fault isn't it 
.
Member since:2005-07-23
Member since:2005-07-06
Yes, I consider ATi's hardware to be very high quality. It's their driver department that consistently drops the ball.
I had a Radeon All-in-Wonder I used in an Athlon XP box with Windows XP Pro. Nice card, but after a few days, crap would start to appear on the screen, then the system would eventually crash. After restarting, it would almost instantly start with the crap on the display.
Reinstalling the driver would sometimes cure the problem... for a few days. I tried new drivers, I tried old drivers, I tried beta drivers... nothing would cure the problem for more than a few days.
After months of pain, I FINALLY found something I could install that cured the problem PERMANENTLY - Fedora Core.
Member since:2005-07-06
and thats the point, even excenlet hardware may have crap drivers.
but as long as the drivers are open then they will continualy improve. not just as long as the company that makes the card think its cost effective to do so...
yes this most likely means a slowing down of the scycles of development but i must say that for me that would be nice. this rollecoster ride that tech have been for a while is just getting silly.
Member since:
2005-07-06
would you consider ati hardware quality?
i recall helping a buddy try to get a ati card to work. windows could not find the required drivers on the cd that came with the card, and at the time we did not have access to a net connection.
end result? one f--ked up system that could only display 256 color vga...