What makes a production kernel?

[Paul Gear]

Tom Diehl wrote:
> ...
> What I fail to see is why people buy this crap from companies and then
> whine on these lists that it does not work. This is just plain stupid.
> Do you really think whining that you screwed up on these lists is going
> to change anything?? PLEASE PLEASE go whine to NVIDIA, or buy from a
> hardware vendor who is interested in supporting open source.

Let me try to help you see:  The only entry-level AGP video cards i can
buy new now locally (Brisbane, Australia) are ATI and NVIDIA.  (A
GeForce2 MX400 (!) 64 Mb for AU$58 and a Radeon 9200 SE 64 Mb for
AU$65.)  I'm sure the market is different in other countries, but i
don't think Australia is an unrepresentative part of the world.

What this means is that unless i go for a low-performance onboard IGP,
which would mean a new motherboard (although that may be a good thing
given my problems with the iteraid driver ;-), *i can't buy a card from
a non-closed vendor*.  The cheapest non-ATI/NVIDIA card i could find was
a $299 Matrox (i don't know what their Linux support is like), and there
were only 3 models on my supplier's price list of more than 40 cards.

I know that NVIDIA's approach to driver support is bad, but if market
forces mean that there aren't any viable alternatives, what can we do?

I wrote to NVIDIA suggesting that having a non-GPL network card driver
for their nForce chipset was a bad idea, and the guy who wrote back to
me (i was surprised that he actually did so) wanted to talk about how
NVIDIA were going to rock the gigabit ethernet market with their
integrated networking, not about software licenses.

They need reeducating, but it's going to be a slow process, and in the
meantime we still have to provide a working OS for people's computers.

-- 
Paul
http://paulgear.webhop.net
-- 
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should i start my email reply *below* the quoted text?
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