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Re: Back to Windows??



At 11:18 PM 2/19/2001 +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote:
On Sun, 18 Feb 2001, Christopher Wolf wrote:
> At 09:04 PM 2/18/2001 +0100, A. Demarteau (linux rules!) wrote:
>>On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Jan van Veldhuizen wrote:
>> > This afternoon I bought a box with Suse Linux 7 and a set of books.
>> > It took me 2 hours, but now X Windows is running properly. But my
>> printer is
>> > not supported, and I have not yet configured my ISDN modem.
>>That's often the problem with first having the hardware and then
>>deciding to install linux on it.
>
> Heck, hardware's not a problem as long as 1) you write all your own
> drivers, or 2) you don't buy anything manufactured in the last 2
> years.

What a load of nonsense. I have not written a driver for Linux /ever/,
and have not hand a problem with hardware - including things that were
less than a month or two old.

Now, not all hardware is supported, yes. That's not the majority of
hardware, in my experience, and especially not the common hardware.

So, you make the assertion that little is supported. Back it up:

/What/ hardware are you talking about?


I'll give you an easy one: The Onstream "Linux Certified" DI-30 tape drive.

Works fine under Windows. Boot Linux. Recognized as an ATAPI EIDE device. ide-tape loads and assigns it ht0. Doesn't work; generates lots of pretty lines like:

ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc =  8, key =  3, asc = 11, ascq =  0
ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc = 10, key =  5, asc = 24, ascq =  0
ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc =  1, key =  5, asc = 24, ascq =  0
ide-tape: ht0: I/O error, pc =  a, key =  2, asc =  4, ascq =  2

After checking into what Onstream means by "Linux Certified", I find a 28,000 line kernel patch file that changes dozens of files. Huh? Just to support one little tape drive?? Is this patch installed already? Guess I have to download the kernel source and find out. Nope. I think.

So I end up re-writing ide-tape.c using the patchfile as a guide. Only took a couple hundred lines of changes. (I'm not going to install 28,000 lines of questionable changes.)

Of course, a new user then gets to figure out how to recompile a new kernel, including answering a hundred low level questions, only 80% of which are actually documented. Hope you like "defaults".

I have others, including 2 year old Ethernet cards that didn't have drivers I could find, other cards that seem to not be supported by any driver related to it's name, and a real sound blaster that doesn't completely get along with the sb drivers.



> Of course, even this doesn't hold for video cards. Unless you have
> free year to tweak the X config, you're going to have black bars all
> around the screen (although truthfully, I've never seen an
> installation that didn't -- on Linux).

Again, I don't know what hardware you run, but I have not this specific
problem.

Now, most monitors will not use the full screen when you run any given
mode through them. They will use something smaller. So, use the little
buttons on your monitor and adjust it.

The only reason most Windows machines come from the shop /without/
needing that is because the little person at the shop has already done it.

I have seen the same "black bars" when changing resolutions, colour
depths, refresh rates or whatever, under Windows.


I think you've been spoiled. I have a Matrox Millenium card, pretty common. Never have black bars under windows, nor matter which settings I use. Always have them under Linux. Pushed the equations as far as they'd go using the raw numbers from the manuals, and could not remove them.



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