OT: Linux flavors...

[Fairlight]

When asked his whereabouts on Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 03:43:11PM -0700,
Bill Campbell took the fifth, drank it, and then slurred:
> 
> We're running 9.1 on a test machine here, and have run into a few
> headaches, primarily with devices that aren't fully supported on
> the 2.6.x kernels yet (e.g. nvidea graphics).  I'm probably going

Something fetchnvidea doesn't even help with?

> The folks who do Win4Lin seem to have stopped releasing any
> prepatched kernels.  They had been doing them as recently as SuSE
> 9.0 (or was it 8.2).  IHMO, this isn't the smartest thing they
> ever did as configuring Linux kernels is almost a lost art since
> the modular kernels, first from Caldera, now from SuSE have been
> so good at providing the necessary support without having to deal
> with building your own kernels.

I don't get it.  Why build the whole kernel?  Just build a module against
the particular release of a vendor's kernel.  Someone from this list (I
don't even remember who) had a D-Link wireless card and some other dist I
never would have put in place (maybe RH9).  I took a RH7.3 box and just
dumped the matching kernel source tree and compiled the module against it,
then gave him the module binaries.  You don't even have to be -running- the
kernel...just have the same source tree.

I fail to see why HW vendors can't just get the latest SRPMS from vendors
and build the module for each platform as they're released.  It's just
inexcusable not to, IMHO.  But I hate it when companies only support like
every tenth kernel revision (or worse...).  I -had- to secure one Adaptec
with the previously imfamous i2o driver for 3200 controllers, and when I
got done with them, they gave me the source--which had patches for EVERY
kernel release--but they'd only released two out of about 18.  Now that's
annoying.  A moot point now that i2o has been rolled in officially, but as
a general anecdote it holds true--places follow this practice and it's
inexcusable.

mark->
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