Buchan Milne wrote:
Sure, for the Radeon 7500, there is no excuse (but AFAIK it should work fine out-the-box on 9.2), but for newer Radeon's, there isn't much we can do, since no free software driver supports them yet.
That's not absolutely the case. The Vesa driver supported my Radeon 9600 without acceleration, which is all you need to get a workable desktop, which is what we should be trying to provide at install as a minimum. There would be much less issue if problems were along the lines of "my games run slow", than "I get dumped at the command prompt after installation".
For some reason, this guy says the Vesa driver doesn't work for him. He hasn't provided enough info to be able to figure out what's going on, and probably won't now. Could very likely be user error (I suspect it may be configuration of his monitor rather than his card that is failing), but we will probably never know now, because he was put off by the difficulty of it all. It might be annoying, but we need people like that, and we certainly don't need them telling stories about how lame Mandrake is.
XFree86 doesn't support these cards yet AFAIK. You have to have the non-free ATI driver. Fedora won't ship it, and the drivers are: - -on
the commercial CDs - -on the Club.
Yes, I've pointed this out, and that it would be fairer to compare the Mandrake box-set with Windows, but you aren't going to get many people spending money on Mandrake box-sets or Club membership, if it gets a reputation for being hard to install or (in extremis) damaging hardware.
This is ATIs problem, if they can't sort out their driver installation routine for non-free software. They are the ones providing bad support for their products. Most NVidia newbies don't have this problem.
Agreed. It is frustrating that the only distro they support without having to compile modules (and therefore download the *&%^ing missing kernel-source) is RedHat. Can't Mandrake contact them and provide modules to bundle with their install package, the same way they have bundled RedHat modules? Presumably it would be in ATI's interests to make this work as easily as possible with as many distros as possible.
There is currently nothing that can be done about this issue. Nothing. Unless you are volunteering to write a free software driver that supports these cards.
As I say, Vesa works with at least some Radeon 9600 cards, so presumably there _is_ something that can be done about this.
Steffen Barzus had his device replaced, no-one has reported *not* having their device replaced.
Good news.
It's unfortunate, but this would have happened to some distro (whoever merged packet writing first), since it's very unlikely the problem would have been found by people manaully patching packet writing into their kernel (the patch has been available and in use for a long time).
True. Mandrake has always been bleeding-edge. But if it's risky
installing it before more experienced users have had a chance to test
it, what were Mandrake doing providing it for inclusion with a UK
magazine before it had even gone on public release? I thought the idea
this time was that the public download edition and box-sets would be
delayed for a while, to give Club and Cooker members a chance to run it
to spot and fix the most serious gremlins (and provide an incentive for people to join the Club). This pretty well undermines that.
So, I guess no-one applies service patches etc (some of which cause bigger problems, such as XP SP1 messing up virtual memory management)?
Exactly. And why do you think Windows has the reputation it does? It's a
regular refrain of linux advocates that linux is more stable than Windows. Is this not a part of what they are referring to?
I'm a long way from being a Windows advocate. I just don't think it helps for linux to suffer from the same problems as Windows. I want linux to be better than, not as good (or bad) as Windows.
Well, the only additional issue you have mentioned (besides the LG issue) is totally out of our hands. No distro can currently support the latest Radeon cards without free software. So, users should either bite the bullet and install the ATI drivers manually, buy the release, or join the club and use the packages there (and hope they have been updated for the new kernel too).
I gave you an example. I don't think it will help anyone for me to copy every problem on the forum to this list. The problems are many and varied, but they mostly resolve to either (a) "I couldn't complete installation", or (b) "I was dumped at a console when rebooting after installation". It's easy to belittle less experienced users' problems one by one, but if Mandrake wants to be seen as a user-friendly desktop OS, it has to cope with these problems. Maybe it's only a matter of not putting the new release out too early to the public in the way that they did, but if you've got a lot of people with problems like this, it's a sign that something is wrong.
Cheers,
Bruno
