Michael Black wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Neil Jones wrote:
>
>>
>> Ok, enough of venting. Now I want to know which hardware vendors are
>> most Linux friendly?
>>
>> Thank you in advance for any help.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> NJ
>>
>> PS - I have been using Linux since 92. My preffered distribution is
>> Slackware.
>>
> But you don't really understand Linux.
>
> Linux won't work with some hardware, because it's either too new to have
> been incorporated into the latest release, or the manufacturer won't
> release information about it. In the latter case, sometimes nobody will
> ever bother to create a driver, while in others someone will make the
> effort to uncover what is needed to control that hardware and then the
> driver appears.
>
This is the key point.
As far as CPU and processors go, its all Intel *86 technology, so Linux
at that level will always work.
By and large, there are only a limited numbers of chipsets that do
things like Disk, USB and so on. So its not hard to cover those bases well.
The problems arise when you strat to plug other things in, or specific
USB devices.
Each one needs a driver, every driver is chipset specific, and may or
may not have to accomodate issues to do with how that hardware is
actually implemented. So its worse than chipset specific, it can be
board level specific.
Now if as Michael has indicated, the chip or board manufacturer has been
heavily leaned on by Microsh*t, or are excessively paranoid about their
technology, they may not release enough information for a driver to be
constructed other than what they themselves supply, typically Windows
only, and possibly MAC OS-X.
This means that individuals must work to reverse engineer the Windows
drivers, or find some way of using them.In the case of hardware that
needs downloadable firmware into it to work, you also need that. That
will typically be non-free and licensed by the board manufacturer.,
Hence the non-free part of the linux distribution.
It also gets worse. 64 bit can be a killer if the manufacturer only has
32 bit drivers compiled up for Linux. you can run 32 bit SOFTWARE
applications on a 64 bit kernel., because you have 32 bit libraries to
act as a shim. You cannot run 32 bit DRIVERS at 64 bit kernel level,
because typically no shim exists.
The issues I have had are as follows
1/. one laptop screen simply would not work properly under X windows. It
would only work briefly at first boot, then all subsequent boots put it
into a state where the actual laptop screen was complete garbage. It
would drive an external monitor fine though. It was fine under windows.
My conclusion was that the actual screen rather than the video chipset,
was flawed, and the supplied windows drivers were deliberately crippled
to keep the video chipset inside limits that the inbuilt screen could
handle. Possibly I could have made it work, but life is short.
2/. A scanner that worked fine on a 32 bit kernel under Xsane, using HP
supplied linux drivers, would not work under 64 bit. The drivers were
simply unavailable in 64 bitand the 32 bit did not work.
3/. to get a broadcom WiFi chipset to work properly, required some later
kernel, that fortunately was within the Debian current stable
distribution, and the download of firmware from the non-free area of the
distro. It now works tolerably well.
4/. That particular laptop still hasn't really got a stable
sleep//hibernate/power management layer working. Because its got such
short battery life, I simply don't use the battery much., It has often
however got into a state that requires it to be removed from mains AND
battery power (by removing the battery) so that it will respond to the
power button. Probably this is a configuration issue.
5/. This desktop machine was built from the cheapest motherbaord my
local supplier could sell me. Its fast with a dual core celeron, and
stuffed full of RAM, however when first installed, it was too slow to
keep up with full screen flash video. Upgrading it to 64 bit broke the
scanner, as described above, but did allow better video. The laptop I
have described above was fully able to do full screen Flash on 64 bit
though, so I dug deeper and came up with the general impression that the
current kernel and Intel video drivers together were the main problem.
The board has on inbuilt Intel video chipset. Ubuntu users seemed to be
saying that a later kernel and its associated video drivers solved the
speed problem. Fortunately Debian had a backport of the latest kernel
which meant I wouldn't have to actually go unstable to get it. It
worked, and video is now acceptably fast. It only broke VMware, as that
had to be patched to work with that kerenel.
So it wasn't pain free.
I will add one further issue. My wide writes websites. On a Mac. she
came up with an issue with Firefox 3.5, which is not available under
Debian at all - the Iceweasel port is a port of firefox 2.X at current
stable levels. 32 bit firefox had issues and was the only downloadable
pre-compiled binary for Linux.
I ended up compiling Firefox 3.5 from source. Non trivial. It works very
well, but one or two of the available plugins crash. The problems of
moving away from the distro as supplied, if you like. You are on your own.
That way I was able to trace the issue and sort out the compatibility
problem, BUT it wasn't simple.
What this means in effect, is that you need a clear idea of what you
want your system to do, before you embark on building it. The devil is
in the detail. Whilst you may reasonably expect Windows to work on any
hardware at all, and have all the right drivers, because that hardware
is unsaleable if it does not, the same is never true of Linux.
Google is your friend. If someone else has done it already, chances are
you can, too. Generally the plainer and more vanilla the hardware, the
better it will work. If you need an app that doesn't come with the
distro as a package, ask about that as well. If you want to use a
scanner, check very carefully to see its supported under Xsane: Many are
not. Also check printers for proper CUPS support.
If using wireless, find out what the chipset is and check that, also
check the video hardware.
If the hardware ticks the boxes, and you are content with the
performance from the standard distros, then linux works straight out of
the box with zero hassles. If for any reason it does not, then fixing it
is often not as simple as downloading the latest driver. If you are
lucky, there is a reasonably simple workaround., If not, you may end up
with a particular hardware combination that is completely beyond your
ability to make work.
This may sound negative, but it shouldn't. Most Linux users take their
hardware, install the distro and get fabulous results with very little
effort. Some do not. I am amazed that its as good as it is, as in
general the weight of the IT industry is either neutral, or negative
towards it. Manufactures see no especial reason to support it, as it is
zero income for them and may reduce sales of MS crap, which they do make
money from.
Allone can say is there are some very smart dediacted people out there
making it work pretty well.
Installation today is certainly no worse than - say - windows 98. Actual
performance is better than MS in almost every way. My screen now looks
as good as a Mac in terms of font rendering and general pleasantness.
way better than XP for example. But unlike the Mac, I can actually fix
it if it goes off beam.
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