Re: [Cooker] Mandrake 9.1 Should be Delayed

[George Mitchell]

Robert L Martin wrote:

 Problems with ATI and nVidea products.  Only the two most

popular video cards on the market.


.. And the two that prefer to make proprietary drivers rather than, if 
they want the speed and quality, making their work fully open..
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
okay so start running down the chipsets on boxed computers (the former 
M$ market)
Dell, Compaq ,HP  all use either Nvidia or ATI chipsets mostly. This 
means that the biggest market for Linux will also A Not care about 
"free -(L,G)" B Know the least about the pain part of Linux

These folks just want it to work after M$ decides that M$ doesn't
Kernel , X, Multimedia and basic office/network should be "Stop 
Presses" level bugs
by default. If Joe Luser can boot the system with X, play cds/mp3s, 
type notes, surf and go online it can ship but if those things can't 
be done DO NOT SHIP (or plan on shipping a patch disc)




And the real irony here of course is that ATI chipsets are NOT closed 
source.  My ATI Radeon in fact works splendidly with OPEN SOURCE 
XFree/DRI software under Red Hat 8.0.  But what kind of answer do you 
get when you bring that up on the cooker list?  That they are 
proprietary of course and nobody challenges it because it is an easy 
answer and much preferable to admitting that it might be Mandrake that 
is failing to adequately QA their product.  So Mandrake is learning to 
FUD their way along just like Microsoft and avoid facing the hard 
questions.  The same is true of /dev/sequencer support under a number of 
cards that used to work with OPEN SOURCE drivers but no longer do.  When 
you ask questions you face silence, or some wise one chiming in with 'Oh 
thats because its proprietary'.  The world will forgive Linux companies 
for NOT supporting closed source products like nVidia, but OPEN SOURCE 
hardware that does not work simply because the priorities are elsewhere 
will not play well with potential desktop consumers and attempting to 
paint known open source products as being closed will not play well 
either.