On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Tellurye wrote: >Excellent words!! Although I confirmed with both Intel and Dell before I >bought the Inspiron 2600, and they stated the bug has been fixed, I bought >it and had the issues everyone was having. Dell conveniently forgot to >mention that the bug may not work on all of their laptops, and >unfortuneately, I got one of those. While they may have confirmed that it was fixed, they did not confirm to you that it was fixed in highly developmental i810 driver which is incompatible with XFree86 4.2.[01] from XFree86 CVS, and they did not tell you that that would not be officially released to the public until late January (now bumped to February or later possibly by XFree86.org) I presume. So while they "fixed" it, their fix is not in a stable release of XFree86 yet, and not in any released open source operating system product yet. >You mentioned RH will fix this in the next release. When will it be out / >What will it be called? Red Hat does not preannounce version numbers, names, or release dates. If you would like to test-drive the fix, install our latest beta release (phoebe). >Issues like this make it very hard to spread the word on Linux. >I want to learn it so bad..yet have a hard time finding a >machine that it will run / install on, without knowing C. The problem is that this is not the OS vendor, be it Red Hat, or anyone else's responsibility. We do our best effort to support the hardware that has open source drivers. We, like all other open source Linux distributions, and other OSs, rely on the XFree86 community to put out a stable release, and to maintain it. We merely do our part in the open source community by troubleshooting and fixing problems also, and contributing them back to the community. There is ample work to be done on XFree86 that could keep 50 engineers busy with endless 60 hour weeks of work fixing bugs in XFree86, backporting releases, adding new features if one had that kind of resources to put into it. One doesn't. It is the hardware vendor who wants people to purchase their hardware, who has the responsibility to write drivers, or to pay someone else to write drivers for their hardware, and to fix the drivers or pay someone to fix the drivers when it does not work for their hardware customers. Or, at a minimum, to provide the open source community with the technical specifications they need to write drivers. Volunteers however - will only spend as much of their time and effort as they feel like doing at any given time. One must also consider: How much did you pay for your OS? How much do other alternatives cost and how well do they fit the needs of the problems you are trying to solve? If Linux isn't the best solution for the problem at hand, or can not meet your needs at the time being, then selet another tool to do the job that can is the sensible thing to do. When there are market forces out there that generate the amount of interest in Linux, and the number of users paying money for Linux - be they corporate, technical, developers, or end uses, or some other category, if those groups of paying customers generate the amount of revenue it would take to make things like XFree86 video drivers all work completely stable out of the box on all hardware relatively well, and to convince hardware vendors to release specifications, etc. - then it might be possible that drivers "just exist" when hardware products are released onto the market - like is done in Windows right now. Until then however - if somethings broken, report bugs somewhere - in Red Hat bugzilla, on xfree86@xfree86.org, to other developers, etc. Some bugs will get fixed, some wont. There simply aren't enough people developing XFree86 in the community to handle all issues that come up with it, including all open source OS vendors combined. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
