begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 03:23:21PM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >So the TJ Lug has a bunch of old machines, but they don't want any > >more... they want new, shiny kit. Good for them... go buy it. When > >you stop accepting old hardware, you've just declared yourself to be > >self-sustaining. > > Yes and no. There has to be a limit otherwise people will just dispose > of their broken crap on you. Given that there is now a cost to > disposing of computer hardware, that needs to be considered.
Agreed. I should have said "old, working, stable machines" or somesuch. (Although, when I was first in college, I had a friend who took any machine he could, and cannibalized 'em to come up with working machines. RAM from here, a CPU from there, a disk from a third, into a case from a fourth... the junk-junk he generally gave to art students to incorporate into their semester projects.) > In addition, motherboard support in the Linux kernel drops off quite > rapidly with age. A computer older than about 2 years starts exhibiting > instabilities with modern Linux distributions. > > Last I checked, open-source video drivers were still stuck at the Radeon > 9200 level since we don't have any good open-source video documentation. > > Linux no longer has the "support everything on the planet" ethic. Now > it's more like, "It runs on my hardware. To hell with the rest of you." True. > This is kind of funny since it was the "runs on any old crap hardware" > that helped make Linux more popular than *BSD which simply refused to > support certain broken hardware. I was looking at BSD in the early 90s, and didn't feel I could afford the hardware to run it, and Linux was out and ran "good enough" on any old crap hardware. I had cheap (i.e., crap) hardware already, and limited funds, and Wanted Out of the M$ world. Wasn't much deliberation. It seems like a mistake to discard your product's distinguishing feature that was in a large part responsible for its success. It would be like IN-N-OUT deciding that they'll no longer make hamburgers, or KFC going poultry-free.... -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
