Re: Buildtime woes and other stuff
On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 10:09:29AM -0500, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> I sympathize for you Oliver. Its frustrating to the extreme to get hardware
> that works fine for Windows but doesn't work well under any other operating
> system because the manufacturer simply doesn't care.
Well buying hardware with chips from companies that have a reputation of
working with linux soon after release is usually safest. ATI doesn't
even have a history for making chipsets for motherboards so who knows if
they even did a good job. Their history of not releasing specs or
decent drivers doesn't make me comfortable either. Their hardware has
usually been very good, but the software support has not. It is a shame
that bad software (which should be easy to fix with some good coders)
can ruin the experience with great hardware.
> ATI's dismal record with video drivers for Linux suggests to me that they
> wouldn't be much better when supporting their mobo chipset under Linux
> either. They're just fine if you're only going to run Windows on your
> machine, but I would stay away from them until their Linux reputation
> improves.
I haven't been happy with ATI windows drivers either. I think avoiding
ATI in general is the safest practice.
> I've heard better things about Nvidia, but I don't use their mobo chipset,
> only one of their separate graphics boards, so I can't speak to their mobo
> chipset.
Well my nForce2 is great, and my wife's laptop has an nforce3 Go 250 or
something like that in it, which seems to work fine with Linux too.
> I'm using an older MSI Neo board using VIA chipsets, and it works exceedingly
> well under Linux. Everything I have is recognized including SMBus, ACPI, and
> Ethernet. However, I don't use SATA, so I can't speak to that. When you
> replace your current motherboard I suggest looking at a VIA-based MSI board.
> I have a suspicion that MSI and VIA, both being Taiwan companies, are
> together able to make a better mobo than MSI working with a foreign company.
> MSI has been making VIA-based boards for a long time, and no one else has yet
> produced a mobo with the equivalent of MSI's Corecell technology, AFAIK. The
> only downside is of course not having built-in graphics on the mobo, I've
> always preferred a separate video card, but YMMV.
Yeah I haven't had problems with the VIA chipsets for K7/K8 either.
Their pentium and k6 chipsets on the other hand I don't think were that
good. SiS seems me to have made their best chipsets for the 486 and not
much interesting since.
Len Sorensen
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