Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 3, 2007 21:34 UTC (Tue) by ofeeley (guest, #36105)
In reply to: Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal) by pizza
Parent article: Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Well, obviously that's true, but it doesn't reduce the central point which is that System76 are basing their systems on GPUs from a company that is incapable of releasing specs to e.g. the nouveau developers.

I'm looking at the whole thing from the very biased perspective of someone that wants to buy a replacement c.$1000 home desktop. I don't need amazing graphics capabilities (although I would like the GPU to be as fast as possible) and only care about the driver being solidly supported by Xorg. Right now that means an Intel G965 Express chipset:
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/g965/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_3000

Given that this can also take Core2Duo E63000 (which is also a selling point) I'd buy a system that was based on that and didn't try to bundle some horrible ATI/nVidia card that I will spend days trying to fix every time I update the kernel. As it happends DELL (at least in Canada) don't offer that combination: I can get a system like that but it comes bundled with either nVidia or ATi. Guess I'll have to just build my own again.

Although I'm not impressed with System76 (exactly because they don't appear to get it and continue providing dodgy hardware) I'm not impressed with DELL either.

If DELL actually come out and provide systems with clearly specificed motherboards (so that I can research and make sure there are no issues) and allow me to choose whether or not to buy an addon PCI-Express video card (should I have the need to dispaly weather simulations in real time) then I'm all for it. Ditto for System76.

If all they're doing is tailoring a particular kernel-version with particular drivrers and calling it "Installed linux" then I have no interest. I want a system that updates stably and with supported, open, Free drivers. Just because someone got it to work long enough to sell it to me isn't enough.

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Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 4, 2007 15:29 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

>I'm looking at the whole thing from the very biased perspective of someone that wants to buy a replacement c.$1000 home desktop. I don't need amazing graphics capabilities (although I would like the GPU to be as fast as possible) and only care about the driver being solidly supported by Xorg. Right now that means an Intel G965 Express chipset:

You could slap a Radeon X300/700/8x0-series card into your desktop and get vastly superior performance than the Intel G965, not even taking into account the performance penalty of the shared-memory approach of the G965. Using only Free Software.

(I have several machines where I put an old PCI graphics card simply because the performance hit from the shared memory graphics adapter was noticable. It's why server-class boards use very low-end discrete graphics (eg ATI's Rage XL) instead of shared memory arrangements)

Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 4, 2007 16:59 UTC (Wed) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you have practical experience with the G965 Express chipsets showing a heavy hit on CPU performance? Intel's own bumf about this generation of integrated graphics chips (X3000) and the wikipedia entry I cited above claim that many of those problems from earlier chipsets have been mitigated. I'm very interested to know if you have observed these problems specifically with this latest chipset?

ps. As an aside, looking at the rantings on Intel's forums from people that see what AIGLX can do with these chips while Vista can't is interesting
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/fo...

pps. It seems that Dell's 22" LCD displays won't support 1680x1050 with the X3000 from other threads on those forums (it seems to be WinXP users complaining about that, but someone else mentioned it was a problem for XOrg7.1 too)

Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 5, 2007 21:45 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802) [Link]

Regarding 1680x1050, all I can say is that it works with GMA950 (945GM) and Dell 20" LCD (2007WFP). I even got it to work with an old first-generation Centrino 855GM. So it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't work with the latest chipset, though I haven't read any of those forums you mentioned.

You do need the new "modesetting" XOrg driver to get it working, though.