On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:31:18 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

>>> ...which is what I meant. If HP gets to pick what hardware goes in,
>>> they can pick exactly the hardware that works with whichever OS
>>> they're preloading.
>> 
>> Sure.  Now, how surprised are you going to be when I tell you that my
>> HP didn't come with openSUSE installed, but with Vista installed, and I
>> installed openSUSE with no problems?
> 
> That's a little different, yeah.
> 
>> (Only thing not working is
>> wireless, and I don't care about that - but I understand there are
>> drivers for Linux for it, just can't be bothered).
> 
> One of the prime areas that doesn't work, so I'm told. (I don't use such
> technology myself, so...)

Um, my wife's wireless card works fine, the one in my t42p works fine, 
and the one in my kids' machine (running from a liveCD) works fine.  In 
fact, the t42p uses an atheros chipset, and the driver is a reverse-
engineered driver, and it works pretty well (just don't ask about the 
access point at the office - that thing is a piece of crap.  The one here 
at home works fine).

>> This thing's got an
>> Nvidia chipset ethernet card in it, not exactly a common type of
>> ethernet card, at least not in my experience.
> 
> My motherboard has the nVidia nForce IV chipset. For quite a while I had
> trouble with various distros not recognising either the Ethernet ports
> or the SATA ports. (Guess where my HD is...) Makes installing the OS
> interesting when it can't find your HD. (Also, the early nForce driver
> would enumerate the HDs in reverse order, which is damn confusing...)

Oh, yes, and this HP uses a SATA drive as well.

>>> :-|   <== not shocked face.
>> 
>> Given that you're on v7, I'm not surprised. :-)
> 
> Well, so many applications won't uninstall cleanly. :-S

One of the *major* problems I have with Windows.

>>> Like I said, Linux has now become pretty easy to use once it's set up
>>> right. I find it's still tricky to set it up correctly sometimes, but
>>> once it works it's really not much different to Windoze. [Except no
>>> random OS crashes.]
>> 
>> It can be, particularly with laptops.  As I said, 5 years ago, it was
>> fairly painful on laptops (in particular), but today the support is
>> very good.
> 
> Something like 8 years ago, I was manually editing the X11 configuration
> file to tell it what DAC chip my graphics card has in it... o_O

That was 8 years ago.  This is now - with OpenSUSE, you use sax2 to do 
the configuration.  ATI cards can be a little flakey to get working, but 
AMD has opened the specs so real OSS drivers are on the way.  The Nvidia 
graphics drivers are quite good, even though they're binary-only (that's 
also what's in the HP for video).

Jim

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