Re: On Linux-friendly manufacturers (was: Re: Linux friendly Mainboard, Video, and Sound Card Manufacturer?)
Well apparently, according to Thomas Winischhofer (author of the SiS
driver for XFree), Sis is not *that* linux-friendly; go and see the
introduction on http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.html.
The guy is a an Austrian Lawyer who wrote the driver by himself with not
much of help from SiS apparently. He's actually a proof for me that
lawyers are not *that* useless :)
-- Jeff
On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 00:33 -0200, Rogério Brito wrote:
> On Jan 15 2005, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
> > Scotty Fitzgerald wrote:
> > >I was wondering if there were any known manufacturers of
> > >Mainboards and Video, and Sound Cards who are known to develop
> > >their product with Linux in mind.
>
> It seems that SiS is a Linux-friendly manufacturer, since they apparently
> give enough documentation and help with drivers for their devices.
>
> Another company that seems to be Linux-friendly is Realtek, but I'm not
> that sure.
>
> > We've been through this before and you are basically on your own. I now
> > have an Abit KT7A and an Athlon 850MHz.
>
> Yes, going through this is not an easy thing, especially if you want to use
> Open Source software only, with graphic cards in particular being a
> nuisance, given the current state of things.
>
> I'm still using an Asus A7V motherboard with VIA KT133 chipset and a Duron
> 600MHz processor. The problem that I have is that the current processors
> that AMD seems to be producing nowadays aren't fit for my motherboard and
> PC133 RAM is not the cheapest to get, since the technology shifted to
> DDR-SDRAM.
>
> And now, with this x86-64 thing and SATA, I think that my system is really
> way outdated.
>
> In other words, I am stuck my desktop. At least, it works quite well with
> Linux. I only wish it were slightly faster for some tasks (like compilation
> of large projects and messing with LaTeX together with Emacs).
>
> And it would be nice if there were review sites (like Anandtech and Tom's
> Hardware) that had more focus on Linux and Open Source drivers.
>
>
> []s, Rogério.
>
> P.S.: One of the nice things about devices with Open Source drivers is that
> you can potentially use them with another architecture. For instance, I
> grabbed a Realtek 8139 card and plugged it into an old Powermac 9500/180MP
> running Linux.
>
> It worked quite well after I recompiled my kernel with support for the
> card, something that would probably not be that easy if the drivers didn't
> have their source open.
> --
> Learn to quote e-mails decently at:
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> http://learn.to/quote
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/toppost.htm
>
>
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