Chris Bannister wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > > I suggest these options. > > > > 1) Install firmware-linux-nonfree and hope it handles your hardware. > > 2) Install the latest backports kernel and drivers and firmware. > > 3) Install Squeeze which had better legacy hardware support. > > Interesting. So it is recommended not to "jump" in and install Wheezy on > "older" hardware?
It all depends. I would definitely try Wheezy. Always better to move forward if possible. But that doesn't mean it will work. I definitely have hardware that works on Squeeze but fails miserably on Wheezy. For example here is one that is still unresolved. And it also concerns failure to run on the raw console like the OP's case. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696571 Change is disruptive. The upstream Linux folks have dropped hardware support for several types of hardware that previously used to work fine. The KMS transition has broken some of my hardware that used to work in Squeeze. It thrashed me and I am upset that they decided not to support older hardware. Because isn't Linux all about not needing the newest hardware? Apparently that is a lost value now. Fortunately other bugs I ran into were fixed before Wheezy. I thought I was going to be able to reference another one but it was resolved okay. Bug#698107 with fermi nvidia hardware for example. That one was grim for a while. But the Debian team backported fixes to make it work. I am still hoping for a fix for the above one however. > So presumably Jessie will be worse still? I hope it is better in Jessie. I hope that by then the Linux kernel will be in better shape than the one for Wheezy. I haven't been testing the latest Jessie kernels across all of my hardware. This isn't really specific to Debian. This is an upstream Linux hardware support problem. It isn't possible but the best thing would be if everyone ran the newer proposed kernels on all of their hardware. Then submitted bug reports when it didn't work. Then worked to get those problems fixed. The only reason the kernel can drop hardware support is that we let them do it without working to make sure that doesn't happen. If we were diligent about testing the newer kernels and complaining when support was removed then I think it would be harder for the kernel folks to remove needed features. I am an optimist. So of course I hope it will be better in Jessie. But in reality I fear that we are going to continue to be worse off with every future release than the last. Because things are getting so complex that it is falling over by its own weight. For example the entire asynchronous event driven design that everything is heading toward feels hard to verify and hard to debug. I expect that the stability that we have experienced up until now will be looked back upon in future years as a lost paradise. Bob
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