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Alright, BUT.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 0:11 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
In reply to: Alright, BUT. by dash2
Parent article: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

> I am just sick and tired of spending days to make hardware work.

Dude! You claim to have been running Linux for five years and can make a statement like that? When you are running linux you make sure any hardware you buy is supported, and after five years you should be rid of any legacy stuff you happened to already have when you switched so that isn't a valid excuse.

Buy known good hardware and you can have a very pleasant install experience. The only fly in the ointment is 3D. Sure, as another poster already mentioned, Intel's shared memory junk is supported but ATI[1] & Nvidia aren't so you have to muck with that one issue.

[1] Yes I know there are Free drivers for older (but very servicable) hardware in x.org's tree. But I have tried using it for years and after a couple of hard lockups go download the driver from ATI.

to post comments

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 7, 2005 13:42 UTC (Wed) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

The free DRI radeon driver is pretty stable in my experience (but then again I only rarely play games). I read somewhere that a new free R300 driver was just released in the xorg tree for newer ATI chips, so the situation is slowly improving.

Alright, BUT.

Posted Dec 16, 2005 10:27 UTC (Fri) by dash2 (guest, #11869) [Link]

Thanks for your comments - both you and the poster above. It is true that if I always only buy specific hardware then it will usually work on Linux. (For some values of "work". It will very often not have a reasonable GUI.) But for example, why should I spend money on an external modem? Why can't I use the "crappy winmodem" on my laptop? You're telling me about freedom but I don't see any advantages, just costs.

Free 3D drivers

Posted Dec 18, 2005 11:32 UTC (Sun) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

>The only fly in the ointment is 3D. Sure, as another poster already
>mentioned, Intel's shared memory junk is supported but ATI[1] & Nvidia
>aren't so you have to muck with that one issue.

Actually, there are free 3D drivers for ATI R100 and R200 based
graphics cards, i.e., Radeon 9250 and below.

There are people working on R300, but AFAIK that's without getting the
programming information from ATI, so if you want to vote with your
wallet, stick with the R200-based cards (and don't buy Nvidia).


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