BW )(: Institute advises EU to forbid windows pre-instaled on PC's

[Matthew Toseland]

On Tuesday 25 September 2007 14:08, Steve Woods wrote:
> Quoting Matthew Toseland <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org>:
> > On the other hand if you have a modern 3d card you need proprietary 
drivers
> > (which means you can't report kernel oopses when you get them...), and if 
you
> > need e.g. a webcam, you're in real trouble (no USB ISO transfers on USB2 
so
> > unless the cam is actually a USB2 device you have to turn off USB2 and use
> > one device per root hub, and most webcams not supported)... Even a 
relatively
> > new motherboard is often a problem. My built-in sound still doesn't work,
> > long after I bought the board (asus, there is a driver, it doesn't produce
> > any sound). Oh, and there's the SMBFS-is-slow-on-most-network-drivers 
problem
> > (if you have local Windows users).
> >
> > But it's improving ... and if the hardware is supported, it probably does
> > work out of the box.
> 
> Thanks for your info on awkward hardware, Matt. As regards 3D graphics 
cards,
> Slashdot recently reported: "AMD has announced they are releasing the specs 
for
> all new Radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community 
to
> develop a fully functional 2D and 3D graphics driver." (Source:
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/06/1335230)

Indeed, and that is one of the coolest things to happen in the Free [ 
Software ] World this year. I've just upgraded to testing so that I can use 
the new Xorg 7.3 ati driver with TV-out support on my 
myth/server/everything-box, and when there is a stable R500/R600 3d driver 
I'll get an ATI card for my desktop (maybe an X2600) ... to play mostly 
commercial emulated games on. :|

Hardware support will still be a problem for new hardware (especially for 
debian's long release cycles), even with open source drivers for 3d cards: 
the driver that supports your specific new card probably is only in testing, 
even if it was simultaneously released... so you can either get the 
proprietary driver (which AMD will still be working on), and hope you don't 
need any support, or upgrade to a beta release of the distro .. some sort of 
backported drivers registry (with auto-install from hardware detection) would 
help, but wouldn't that complicate support? Having said that, most people use 
the computer they bought, and if they bought it with Linux, it will work 
(modulo external devices, which should and often do use standard classes e.g. 
USB Storage).

All software sucks. But some software sucks more than others (is that 
gramatically correct?). As a dev, I know... :) I love free software, but it 
has its problems.
> 
> Cheers
> Woodsy
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.psand.net/pipermail/bristolwireless/attachments/20070925/846691bf/attachment.pgp 
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Bristolwireless mailing list
Bristolwireless at lists.psand.net
http://lists.psand.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bristolwireless