nemesis wrote:
> True.  And here's the secret about getting your compatible hardware 
> without much ado:
> http://www.linux-drivers.org/

Actually, I've taken to going into the store with a LiveCD. I get funny 
looks from the sales people, but it's easy to boot up Suse 11 and look 
at the hardware list and see if it lists everything. At least you know 
there's *some* support there.

I've had at least two machines where GRUB wouldn't even load - probably 
the motherboard or something, which is actually something surprisingly 
difficult to find out about a computer you plan to buy already built.

> Check before you buy new hardware or if you plan to install Linux on 
> your current hardware.  

Yeah. Funny enough, people complain about Vista not supporting hardware 
right, but don't think that's a problem for Linux. :-) "Just buy the 
right hardware to start with."  My machines tend to last a number of 
years, so "buy the right hardware" isn't always possible for me.

> Most core stuff work out of the box, but 
> new-fangled peripherals are quite often difficult to support because 
> they target Windows and the Linux drivers may have to do some reverse 
> engineering to support it.

A lot of extra-cheap stuff tends to give me problems, too.

> If you want games, Unix is not for you, unless it is nethack or conway's 
> game of life. ;)

Yep.

> Povray works fine on Linux, though. :)

I'm going to be getting an 8G-ram 4-core x64 machine shortly, so I look 
forward to trying out the new POV beta. :)

Maybe I'll even get around to finishing up the distributed render code 
I've written and getting it working without manual intervention on 
Amazon's stuff. That could be fun, as long as I'm bored anyway.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yeah. Funny enough, people complain about Vista not supporting hardware 
> right, but don't think that's a problem for Linux. :-) "Just buy the 
> right hardware to start with."

  I think there's a categorical difference here. Windows is *supposed* to
support all PC hardware. Every hardware manufacturer always makes sure that
their hardware will work at least on Windows (and most of them don't give
a rat's a** if it works on other systems or not). So Windows has become
more or less the de-facto OS for hardware compatibility.

  Thus when a new version of Windows is published and it breaks compatibility
with common hardware, the complaints are very justified. Basically you are
not getting what you are paying for: You are paying for an OS which will
allow you to use your computer, and Windows has always "promised" to do that.
When it doesn't, it's a ripoff.

  Nobody promises that linux will work perfectly with every piece of PC
hardware in existence. Thus when it doesn't, it's not a surprise. Tough
luck. If you want to use that piece of hardware, you'll just have to use
Windows, wait for the linux hackers to reverse-engineer the hardware to
make third-party drivers for it (because the hardware manufacturers won't
be of any help here), or buy a compatible version of that hardware. Sure,
this sometimes sucks big time, but nobody has made any promises, and it's
not like it's linux's fault (it's the fault of those hardware manufacturers).

  With linux you *are* getting what you are paying for. Thus it's not a
ripoff.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New escreveu:
> I'm going to be getting an 8G-ram 4-core x64 machine shortly, so I look 
> forward to trying out the new POV beta. :)

Damn lucky bastard!

in a gentle sense...

> Maybe I'll even get around to finishing up the distributed render code 
> I've written and getting it working without manual intervention on 
> Amazon's stuff.

huh?  Distributed render code?  For povray?  on Amazon?

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Warp escreveu:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Yeah. Funny enough, people complain about Vista not supporting hardware 
>> right, but don't think that's a problem for Linux. :-) "Just buy the 
>> right hardware to start with."
> 
>   I think there's a categorical difference here. Windows is *supposed* to
> support all PC hardware. Every hardware manufacturer always makes sure that
> their hardware will work at least on Windows (and most of them don't give
> a rat's a** if it works on other systems or not). So Windows has become
> more or less the de-facto OS for hardware compatibility.
> 
>   Thus when a new version of Windows is published and it breaks compatibility
> with common hardware, the complaints are very justified. Basically you are
> not getting what you are paying for: You are paying for an OS which will
> allow you to use your computer, and Windows has always "promised" to do that.
> When it doesn't, it's a ripoff.
> 
>   Nobody promises that linux will work perfectly with every piece of PC
> hardware in existence. Thus when it doesn't, it's not a surprise. Tough
> luck. If you want to use that piece of hardware, you'll just have to use
> Windows, wait for the linux hackers to reverse-engineer the hardware to
> make third-party drivers for it (because the hardware manufacturers won't
> be of any help here), or buy a compatible version of that hardware. Sure,
> this sometimes sucks big time, but nobody has made any promises, and it's
> not like it's linux's fault (it's the fault of those hardware manufacturers).
> 
>   With linux you *are* getting what you are paying for. Thus it's not a
> ripoff.

I wouldn't say any better.  Thanks to the hardware compatibility lists, 
though, I've never had any hardware problems with Linux at home.  Then 
again, I don't live on the bleeding edge... I'd really want to get a 
tablet to do some drawings...

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Warp wrote:
>   I think there's a categorical difference here. Windows is *supposed* to
> support all PC hardware. 

Oh, I understand, yeah. On the other hand, when Vista-64 comes out and 
old hardware isn't supported, it shouldn't be all that surprising. :-)

> Windows has always "promised" to do that. When it doesn't, it's a ripoff.

Windows still relies on the third-party manufacturers to support their 
devices. I remember back in the Win98 days that you had to make sure you 
got a printer (for example) with the proper drivers.

One of the nice things about the Matrox video cards is they *do* release 
new drivers for new OSes on cards they don't even make any more, and 
they release drivers for older OSes on new cards.

> not like it's linux's fault (it's the fault of those hardware manufacturers).

Sure, but with a new version of Windows not supporting old hardware, 
that's also the fault of the hardware manufacturers, and Microsoft also 
publishes a list of what hardware works with their systems and what 
doesn't, including software that runs on your old OS and tells you what 
is compatible with your new OS and what you'd have to replace. Most 
people ignore that list, is all, at least after the first few months. :-)

I'm pretty sure MS doesn't guarantee that every piece of hardware will 
work with every version of Windows. People just *expect* that. :-) One 
could take what you've said and read it as "Windows works so well in 
this aspect that people are surprised when it breaks, while Linux works 
so poorly in this aspect that most people already know they'll have to 
work around the brokenness."

I just find it funny how often I see things where when Linux does 
something, it's claimed a benefit, and when Windows does the same thing, 
it's claimed a drawback. Technically, even, not just business-wise.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New escreveu:
>> I'm going to be getting an 8G-ram 4-core x64 machine shortly, so I 
>> look forward to trying out the new POV beta. :)
> 
> Damn lucky bastard!
> in a gentle sense...

Heh.

>> Maybe I'll even get around to finishing up the distributed render code 
>> I've written and getting it working without manual intervention on 
>> Amazon's stuff.
> 
> huh?  Distributed render code?  For povray?  on Amazon?


You're familiar with Amazon's ECC, their "elastic compute cloud"? You 
can rent their machines by the hour, fairly cheaply. (Like, $72/month 
for a one CPU machine.)

I wrote code that lets you put together a bunch of "jobs" to run in a 
local directory (which could be shell scripts that invoke POV-Ray), and 
a GUI that will push it up to Amazon's S3. You can run the "backend" 
scripts wherever you want, but it was intended you run them on Amazon's 
compute cloud. (For testing, I just use multiple processes/machines at 
home.) The back ends will pick up jobs that haven't been run, run them, 
and put the results back out in S3 for you. When it's done, all the 
machines shut down, and you have your renders.

I finished the S3 code, and the code that actually does the file 
manipulations and such, but I never wrote the code that lets you start 
it up automatically on a rented computer. You'd have to start the 
processes yourself, log in, and manually fire off the "go look for jobs 
to run" script. For one thing, while I was working on it, Amazon added a 
vital capability, which was the ability to pass something to the machine 
you just fired up without intervention, so you could launch the machine 
and as you launch it provide the login and location information it needs 
to find the jobs.

I've been testing it with a few of the scripts from the short-code 
contest from a while back.

If you want to do an animation, tho, you have to precalculate the stuff. 
It's going to parallelize everything, so it doesn't really help if 
you're doing something like simulation in POV-Ray script. Myself, I 
write code that outputs POV-Ray source, so that doesn't bother me.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Darren New escreveu:
> I'm pretty sure MS doesn't guarantee that every piece of hardware will 
> work with every version of Windows. People just *expect* that. :-) One 
> could take what you've said and read it as "Windows works so well in 
> this aspect that people are surprised when it breaks, while Linux works 
> so poorly in this aspect that most people already know they'll have to 
> work around the brokenness."

Linux doesn't work poorly, its developers simply don't have the 
resources to support all hardware by themselves.

Windows should support, because such hardware is made for them and come 
with Windows drivers and even a seal of Windows compatibility... yeah, 
the hardware manufacturers are to blame.

That's the difference between Windows and Linux:  one has to beg 
manufacturers do their job right, the other actively works hard to make 
unsupported hardware eventually working.

On the plus side, my Olympus digital camera connects just fine to Linux 
without requiring the CD with the Windows driver...

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Darren New escreveu:
> You're familiar with Amazon's ECC, their "elastic compute cloud"? You 
> can rent their machines by the hour, fairly cheaply. (Like, $72/month 
> for a one CPU machine.)
> 
> I wrote code that lets you put together a bunch of "jobs" to run in a 
> local directory (which could be shell scripts that invoke POV-Ray), and 
> a GUI that will push it up to Amazon's S3. You can run the "backend" 
> scripts wherever you want, but it was intended you run them on Amazon's 
> compute cloud. (For testing, I just use multiple processes/machines at 
> home.) The back ends will pick up jobs that haven't been run, run them, 
> and put the results back out in S3 for you. When it's done, all the 
> machines shut down, and you have your renders.
> 
> I finished the S3 code, and the code that actually does the file 
> manipulations and such, but I never wrote the code that lets you start 
> it up automatically on a rented computer. You'd have to start the 
> processes yourself, log in, and manually fire off the "go look for jobs 
> to run" script. For one thing, while I was working on it, Amazon added a 
> vital capability, which was the ability to pass something to the machine 
> you just fired up without intervention, so you could launch the machine 
> and as you launch it provide the login and location information it needs 
> to find the jobs.
> 
> I've been testing it with a few of the scripts from the short-code 
> contest from a while back.
> 
> If you want to do an animation, tho, you have to precalculate the stuff. 
> It's going to parallelize everything, so it doesn't really help if 
> you're doing something like simulation in POV-Ray script. Myself, I 
> write code that outputs POV-Ray source, so that doesn't bother me.

Interesting.

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nemesis wrote:
> Linux doesn't work poorly, its developers simply don't have the 
> resources to support all hardware by themselves.

It works poorly relative to Windows when it comes to supporting 
different hardware. That it isn't the Linux developers' fault doesn't 
make it less true. My honda works poorly compared to a pick-up truck 
when I buy cinderblocks, too. :-)

In other words, reasons and excuses are two different things. True in 
all walks of life.

> Windows should support, because such hardware is made for them and come 
> with Windows drivers and even a seal of Windows compatibility... yeah,
> the hardware manufacturers are to blame.

Yes, in both cases. :-)  Altho I'll admit making the same driver work 
for 32-bit and 64-bit kernels is probably rather a PITA for a 
manufacturer, and I don't imagine it works too well under Windows 
either. I'll have to see when I get my 64-bit machine.

> That's the difference between Windows and Linux:  one has to beg 
> manufacturers do their job right, the other actively works hard to make 
> unsupported hardware eventually working.

I'm sure MS goes through a lot of pain to make popular hardware continue 
to work on new OSes too. They just can't always manage it for 
everything, just like Linux developers can't. Of course, the HW 
manufacturers are more eager to support their hardware under Windows, 
for all the reasons we both know.

> On the plus side, my Olympus digital camera connects just fine to Linux 
> without requiring the CD with the Windows driver...

I've never needed a driver CD for anything that worked like a HD, 
including my cameras. Usually those disks are closer to ad-ware than 
drivers. :-) Some of them come with cool software, tho, but you know, I 
already have a photo editor and a photo organizer on my machine. I don't 
need a new one with each camera.  Printers, yeah, but even there, the 
generic printer driver that comes with Windows usually manages at least 
the basics.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:33:34 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> I've had at least two machines where GRUB wouldn't even load - probably
> the motherboard or something, which is actually something surprisingly
> difficult to find out about a computer you plan to buy already built.

I've seen this a couple of times myself - it's always (in my case 
anyways) been a problem with the way Windows uses the MBR.  Some Linux 
distros install GRUB to the partition rather than the MBR and that'll 
cause problems if Windows is on the machine already - or if it's wiped 
off but the MBR isn't touched.

Jim

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