Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Walter Banks Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: New hard drive Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 15:34:30 -0400 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 66 Message-ID: <55F872C6.7090908@bytecraft.com> References: <20150915100839.fb4527864a22c4e1ca20f50f@eircom.net> <9sclcc-0t2.ln1@sambook.reistad.name> <1013538544464026554.338892peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: 7MUjool4XeWTYcf+xYgcRQ.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.2.0 X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:151402 On 15/09/2015 12:19 PM, Peter Flass wrote: > Morten Reistad wrote: >> In article , philo wrote: >>> On 09/15/2015 04:08 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote: >>>> On Mon, 14 Sep 2015 10:20:16 -0500 >>>> philo wrote: . . . >> >> I tested Linux first on a re-assembled machine from previous top-of-the-line >> 386 servers, with _lots_ of memory and cache, and two _very_ fast ide >> disks, 110 and 120 mb. It was around two weeks after you didn't have >> to build the file system from minix anymore, where you could use a >> distro. My memory fails me of the name of this distro. >> >> I got the character inteface up within a day, and struggled to get >> the display beyond svga, going into driver hell. I got 768x1024(?), but >> the display could do a lot more. That took a few months to sort out. >> >>> Eventually I learned that in setting up the x-server...If I needed to >>> get /something/ going right away...VESA would usually work. . . . > >> This driver hell has plagued the relationship between the open source >> and alternative OS vendors and the hardware pushers for decades. . . >> >> New fancy hardware, requires magic software the hardware guys seem >> to think. So they guard the specs for the API interfaces, and the >> open source people have to reverse-engineer some proper drivers. >> The ones coming from the hardware vendors are uniformly shitty, at >> least in the firt 2 major versions. I have confirmation that this >> problem also plagues Microsoft, but they use their market muscle >> to force out specs and good drivers. . . >> >>> I never bothered to compile my own packages with one exception: >> >> I did the kernel build with -Os and explicit options to build for >> the processor in use. It made a difference in speed. The processor >> was an 80386 with so high clock speed and cache memory (ISTR 8m >> cache, 16m real memory; we took all the cache chips from 8 motherboards >> that were being recycled). . . . >> >> USB drivers seem to have been an exception from the rule above. >> Likewise, the fast ethernet (>= 1G) drivers seem to be seamlessly >> integrated into Linux. >> > > Display drivers are still a problem My laptop has an ATI Radeon card and > driver support is still spotty. What was especially annoying was that the > display worked fine for the install but I couldn't get it to work on the > installed system. I finally had to give up on Redhat and switch to Ubuntu > to get it to work, and it took about six months! > Read this thread and remind me of the advantages of using open source distributions if your time is worth anything. w..