On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Ed Wilts wrote:
<snip>
>- perhaps to find out 3 weeks and 120 man hours >later that the motherboard BIOS is buggy. Doh. Sucks to be Red >Hat and just wasted 120 man hours of effort.
The moral of the story I guess, is that there are only so many
hours in a day, and more reports of alleged bugs than developer hours. Common sense dictates developers prioritize investigating and/or fixing problems that are the most reproduceable and affect the most amount of people with higher priority, and leave the bugs that are unreproduceable or very complex to investigate and/or affect the least amount of people potentially with low priority.
Gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere. ;o)
Ok, my weekly long email is over. As y'were. ;o)
Speaking of buggy BIOS. I have a 490CDT Toshiba laptop that never shuts down from X, on versions of RHL, later than RHL 7.2.
The problem is that the mingetty terminals are not accessable from ALT-F(1-4). If you try to change to the terminal, the machine seems locked-up. If you Logout of X, the LCD screen seems to just start to get brighter and brighter.
If you type a command on the keyboard (startx), it will restart X and the session will load correctly.
It is using the S3 (generic driver) for the video card.
I was wondering if there are versions of BIOS that are optimized for Linux available. The current BIOS that was Flashed to the laptop was version 7.
I start my laptop in text mode and all the virtual terminals work correctly, until I start X. Starting gdm from the command line will allow the graphical login screen to reappear, if I closed down an X session.
Any leads, ideas?
Jim C.
-- A good reputation is more valuable than money. -- Publilius Syrus
