Meh.

Posted Feb 7, 2008 19:26 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Just curious, are you turning your nose up at the limited selection, or the implied lack of GPL-supported drivers (I'm thinking of NVidia¹ here)?

The limited selection issue spills over to the supported distros - BigBoxLinux might better be described as the "Ubuntu Hardware Store".²

I noticed a glaring omission of any mention of GPL-friendly driver support in Mr. Baranowski's announcement above and on the Web site. But, I did see this odd disclaimer under the ATI card on the front page: "Note: This card does not work with Ubuntu Compiz effects."

(I don't know for sure on the GPL-friendliness of the Wi-fi cards on the site - if any of those cards on BigBoxLinux.com have in-kernel or GPL drivers currently, I'd certainly like to know!)

I must say I admire Mr. Baranowski's efforts to market Linux to the Average Joe computer users of the world (well, Canada, anyway). I wish him success with BigboxLinux in this respect.

¹ Disclaimer: I admit I use NVidia's proprietary graphics driver on my desktop (GeForce 6600 driving two monitors in Xinerama/TwinView). I've also used NDISWrapper in the past with a PCMCIA Wi-Fi card (I blame Broadcom for that).

² I don't mean to deprecate Ubuntu here; in fact, I do respect all the work the {K,X,Edu,U}buntu folks have done to evangelize the value of running Linux to the masses. But, I don't use Ubuntu - it doesn't like my system/hardware configuration - and I wonder how much support I'd get from a place like this if I walked in sporting my Slackware laptop? (Yes, I know, Slackware users are probably the third-best group of "do-it-yourself" hackers in the Linux community - I claim that 2nd and 1st place go to LFS and Gentoo hackers). :-)