Gary Gendel wrote: > James, > > I guess we don't see eye to eye on this one. As an open-source project, if > you don't think things are getting done, you should roll up your sleeves and > help, not criticize. > I don't really regard solaris as an open ource project. And I'm glad of that, its not a criticism. In any case, I do indeed disagree with your point of view. I'm not a graphics device programmer, but as a user I certainly have a view on how easy it is to match an OS (and I'm NOT in the OS-supplier game) to devices. > Sure, I would love to see everything on my Thinkpad T60p working on > OpenSolaris, the ATI support would really be nice. However, since the new > ATI code drop just happened in the last couple of days, give people time for > to come up with a strategy to deal with it. > Well, Alan works for Sun, and I guess the issue here is twofold: 1) what is Sun doing about having a strategy for covering desktop devices? 2) what is the community's strategy?
I'm really only interested in the former but if the latter floats your boat, then good for you. If the answer to 1) is 'Its the community's problem'cos we don't care about workstations any more' then that's a strategy in itself. A piss-poor one, but a strategy all the same. Its easy to say that OpenSolaris is not directly related to Solaris and this is an OpenSolaris forum but the reality is that we know which foot the boot is on, and without ANY external contribution its hugely valuable as a glimpse of what's coming down the pipe to real Solaris. > That said, I'd love to take a stab at porting the code as long as there was a > mentor willing to help me get set up and give direction. At minimum I can do > testing on my T60p whenever I'm asked. > I'm NOT going to offer to help. The last thing a graphics subsystem project needs is amateurs. When Solaris needs a kernel module to value some swaps, maybe I'll volunteer then. Let's be realistic, eh? (Open)Solaris should (in my view) have a significant advantage over other free operating systems precisely because Sun can provide direction and control and make a roadmap stick - something Red Hat can't do. Of course, they'd have to actually do it. In this particular case, its clear that AMD has a nice solution for integrated motherboards - and also for the retail graphics cards for midrange. It would be kinda handy to know what Sun's strategy is at least as far as a desire to address these systems - and secondly what Sun is doing and what its looking to pick up from outside. Waiting for some handy free software solution to show up is a) very passive as a strategy and b) bound to result in trailing Linux (let alone Vista) rather than leading. James
