TorNorbye wrote: [...] > I'm sure most devices work with Linux -- especially if the devices > aren't new. The story from some other post in this thread of somebody > taking their 5 year old system and hooking it up to Ubuntu flawlessly > didn't surprise me in the least. But where you can run into trouble is > if you buy a brand new top of the line graphics card, or something > obscure like a fingerprint validator Unfortunately that's not true either. Generally speaking Linux tends to support old hardware well, and I usually expect it to work out of the box on older hardware. For setting up a basic OS and office configuration on an machine a few years old, using either Ubuntu or Windows I'd estimate about 1/2h and 4h respectively. Unfortunately both can fail.
Some cases I had recently: * an old D-Link WLAN card causes Kernel panic in recent Ubuntus (used to work after fiddling, I haven't bothered again) * my DVB-T tuner card stopped working after updating the driver. Since you build that one from a HG repository anyway I just rolled back to revision 10000 since it's a nice round number :-) * I lost the support for the binary graphic card driver on one machine since new ATI drivers don't support the chipset (~4yrs old) anymore, but you need the new drivers for X.org 1.6. Running Google Earth on the OSS driver kills the machine. OTOH installing Ubuntu on my Dell Mini was a breeze and while looking at PDFs was painful on the Windows XP installation it came with, I now find myself coding on the train using a pretty normal Eclipse setup. My current advice re Linux hardware is to stick with the Intel stack since that seems to work well out of the box. Of course I have only anecdotal evidence for that. Just to make sure I don't get bashed for Linux-hating: getting those pieces of hardware to work on Windows can be a real pain, too. Don't get me started on installing Bluetooth hardware on Windows (not sure about newer ones, I haven't tried for a while. That is a type of hardware that Linux seems to grok out of the box every time I try. Apart from gaming I don't use Windows as primary OS, my non-Open-Office-needs are usually covered well by the Terminal Server at work and VMs elsewhere. I have some machines that aren't even dual-boot despite the fact that the license sticker is still on them :-) Peter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
