Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > The area that Linux always lets me down is hardware support. Especially > USB and Firewire. Why? USB has only been out for what? 10 *years*.
hmm...My USB stuff works great. My keyboard works. My mouse works. My external USB HD and thumb drive work. The only thing that ever failed to "just work" was a USB video camera for video conferencing and that was because USB apparently has no standard for video and this thing implemented some proprietary thing they did not release specs for. So I dumped that and plugged in a firewire video camera and it *just worked*. :) > Graphics support on Linux is just garbage. This is only partially the > fault of Linux. The lack of specs from nVidia and ATI cause it. > However, the Linux folks always claim "if we only had an open source > graphics chip, we'd support it like crazy.". Well, one exists. It's > the Via Unichrome chip/chipset. > > And how many people are working on it? I count less than 10. Nice > "community support". <snort> I wouldn't blame the community so much for this. I'm pretty active in the Linux world and I have never heard of this Via Unichrome chipset. I think it needs more visibility. I googled for it and it looks like it is a whole chipset. So you actually have to buy a specific motherboard to get it. And it only works with an AMD cpu. That seems much more limiting than putting it on a PCI/PCI-x card and selling it individually. In order to get "community support" the potential developer has to have not only heard of this product but he has to be able to afford it. To develop for one of these things would require a developer to buy a whole system basically. That is a lot different than plunking down $50 for an Nvidia or ATI PCI/PCI-x card. It is pretty clear that Via did not intend for this to be the open source graphics chip the Linux folks have been pining for. <snort chuckle guffaw> -- Tracy R Reed http://ultraviolet.org -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
