does anyone want dell customer support???

Posted Nov 2, 2006 19:03 UTC (Thu) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138)
In reply to: does anyone *want* dell customer support??? by einstein
Parent article: Linux on More Dell Client Systems? (Direct2Dell)

And looks like you too haven't had much experience with the device driver
problems.
Here's what I have to say for Intel:
http://bughost.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1112

I'd agree with you that nVIDIA is good at Linux driver support. Yes, but
not comparable to their offering of the Windows drivers. The Linux drivers
still don't have SLI support. The official stable drivers still don't have
GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap

And ever wondered whom to report when you find that your laptop doesn't
resume to X when the proprietary driver is loaded.

Try reporting a bug on a proprietary module at kernel.org and see the fake
reaction they make.

Ideally, if the kernel developers really mean what they say, they should
drop the framework to load binary modules. That'd make it simply a black
and white game. You either support or you don't. The kernel should only
allow loading of a module which is licensed as the kernel is.

does anyone want dell customer support???

Posted Nov 2, 2006 19:22 UTC (Thu) by einstein (guest, #2052) [Link] (2 responses)

> And looks like you too haven't had much experience with the device driver problems.

Actually, I've had trouble with video drivers - my experience with the FOSS DRI drivers for ATI Radeon cards has been an unmitigated disaster. Sure, I can report the crashes and hangs, but they never stopped.

In contrast the nvidia proprietary drivers have been like the rock of gibraltar on my desktop machines. Are they perfect? No, there are some things they need to fix, but the FOSS alternatives are few - at this point the Intel 965 looks good.

> And ever wondered whom to report when you find that your laptop doesn't resume to X when the proprietary driver is loaded.

No mystery there, nvidia says up front that resume doesn't work yet.

>Try reporting a bug on a proprietary module at kernel.org and see the fake reaction they make.

ROFL - we all know the drill there, but luckily I haven't had any bugs to report lately. I did report crashes and hangs back in the day, with the FOSS ATI radeon drivers, but they were never resolved AFAIK.

I just hope Intel moves more aggressively to make their next generation graphics widely available, since the FOSS drivers allow for nice things like laptop suspend/resume

does anyone want dell customer support???

Posted Nov 2, 2006 21:55 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

In order to keep increasing revenue in a slow-growing PC market, Intel has to keep making a bigger and bigger fraction of the parts in each PC. So look for them to do for graphics what they did for Ethernet, sound, and wireless -- sell a part that's might not be the absolute performance leader, but that does enough for most users, and eats the category leader's volume sales. (Next somebody-other-than-Intel part to go: the BIOS?)

does anyone want dell customer support???

Posted Nov 3, 2006 4:10 UTC (Fri) by N0NB (guest, #3407) [Link]

Actually, Intel has been doing just that for some time, i865, i915 onboard video chips come to mind. You know, the ones that derive their video memory from the main memory bank(s). I have two IBM machines with the i865 chips and they work well. Neither machine needs outstanding video performance, so they are "good enough".

does anyone want dell customer support???

Posted Nov 2, 2006 19:31 UTC (Thu) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link]

The NVIDIA beta 9125 linux drivers do, actually, have support for SLI (although I haven't tried it). It's true that they don't push the beta features into the production drivers with the same speed as with their WinXP drivers, but the feature set actually stays remarkably consistent between the two branches.