On Tue, 2011-10-04 at 23:03 -0400, David wrote: > > A more accurate description of the situation is 'Oracle will update > > VBox's guest additions to support new X.org releases as and when it damn > > well pleases, and as said guest additions are closed source, everyone > > else is tied to Oracle's schedule'. > > > Point taken. But? They don't support Fedora development. So Adam here > is where explain this the the OP.
Sure. But explain it accurately. Sometimes Fedora has a pre-release X server, sure. But sometimes it has a released one, and Oracle still don't support it. And the big roadblock is the guest additions being closed source, or else we could just update them ourselves. > > "Can never"? Hardly. It's perfectly possible to do it in xorg.conf. It's > > just that no-one feels particularly inclined to maintain a GUI tweak > > tool for xorg.conf any more. > > > What you need to do Adam is listen to the many disadvantaged Linux users > that don't have 'shiny new hardware'. And then *you* say -- 'Let they > eat cake'. Pretty much, yes. > Fits dude. Linux has *always* claimed that 'we run on anything'. And > that no longer fits. And now all *you* have to do is to single out just > what Linux does not run on any more and explain it to them. Fedora is not 'Linux'. Some people make this claim on behalf of Linux. Some distributions of Linux intentionally make such claims. Fedora doesn't and never has. It's not anywhere in Fedora's publicity. Please feel free to point out where Fedora claims to run especially well on old hardware. And if we're talking about r128 graphics cards, make no mistake, we're talking *old* hardware. https://fedoraproject.org/en/features/ https://fedoraproject.org/en/about-fedora https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations (especially read First) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base None of those says anything at all about Fedora working specifically to support old hardware. Fedora has never been a project that is particularly about that. Fedora is about pushing forward the capabilities of free software, as the 'First' foundation indicates. system-config-display required a significant investment of development time on the part of Fedora's X maintainers. At a certain point they felt hardware detection in X had advanced to the point where it was more productive to devote that development time to other areas of X work than to maintaining s-c-d. No-one else decided they wanted to spend their time maintaining s-c-d, and so no-one does. Maintaining such a tool isn't free, it requires considerable time, and no-one involved with Fedora apparently feels that it's worth investing the necessary time to maintain that tool. In general, this aligns quite accurately with Fedora's principles. > When I started with Linux it was Red Hat 5.2 and Mandrake 6.0. And all > the way to today Mageia and Mandrake can still find that really old, no > longer used but still works, CRT monitor, decide what it it, and > configure it properly. > > And Fedora has, as far back as i can recall, long before you left > Mandriva and cam here, fedora does a 'duh' and does not configure that > same monitor. Fedora and Mandriva (and Mageia) are different projects with different goals and different priorities. It doesn't really provide much value to draw this kind of comparison between them. (I can tell you that maintaining the database MDV uses for graphics card detection was a huge time sink - it would take me 20-30 hours of work per release cycle - and I *often* found myself wondering if my time wouldn't better be invested elsewhere. But MDV, for commercial reasons, needs to support the NVIDIA proprietary driver, so there wasn't a whole lot of choice. Someone else maintains it now, and I pity the poor sucker.) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
