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Re: Hardware hard in Linux?

  • Subject: Re: Hardware hard in Linux?
  • From: Kier <vallon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 11:40:49 +0100
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • References: <slrne589le.42g.jason@jason.websterscafe.com> <2355073.mYSBNbzAbL@schestowitz.com> <pan.2006.04.30.16.59.05.212713@tiscali.co.uk> <1180257.64mzIdGQQO@schestowitz.com> <pan.2006.04.30.19.04.56.265390@tiscali.co.uk> <1146443830.020672.197910@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com> <pan.2006.05.01.09.39.20.215019@tiscali.co.uk> <1961527.fUdB76D8NV@schestowitz.com>
  • User-agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table)
  • Xref: news.mcc.ac.uk comp.os.linux.advocacy:1105439
On Mon, 01 May 2006 11:01:31 +0100, Roy Schestowitz wrote:

> __/ [ Kier ] on Monday 01 May 2006 10:39 \__
> 
>> On Sun, 30 Apr 2006 17:37:10 -0700, Larry Qualig wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Kier wrote:
>> 
>> <snip>
>> 
>>>>
>>>> I'd probably buy a Dell, next time. They're good value.
>>> 
>>> I have a few Dell laptops and a Toshiba as well. Overall SuSE works
>>> fine on the Dell except for the following. 1) Built-in wireless. It
>>> wasn't supported out of the box by SuSE but I was able to find and
>>> download an RPM to get it to work. There's a project at SourceForge
>>> that I tried to compile but I gave up on it and found the re-built RPM.
>>> Took the easy way out.
>> 
>> Nothing wrong in that :-) My brother had to do something similar with his
>> laptop, I believe, to get the wifi working. Separate cards may be annoying
>> in some ways, but if you get one that's a dud with Linux, at elast you can
>> try another
> 
> 
> See the following article, which was published last night:
> 
>         http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS1977847793.html
>                         [ Linux gains enhanced WiFi stack ]

Yes, I just read that posta few minutes ago. It's a very good
development, one of the things which is definitely needed and helpful.
Another in the mounting stack of complaints the anti-Linuxers can no
longer use against us.

> 
> 
> This will ultimately make, once distributed and propagated to the latest from
> each vendor, manual installation of Wi-Fi a thing of the past. From what I
> have been told time and time again, distributions are not the cause for
> incompatibilities with hardware. It is usually the kernel and its 'glue'
> with the remainder (various packages).

It can't be an easy task, sorting all this out.

> 
> 
>>> So wireless is now working fine and the only remaining annoyance (#2)
>>> is the "glide-point" pad that's used as the mouse. It basically works
>>> but it's just not very smooth. The mouse seems to jerk around the
>>> screen more than it should. There's one driver (I think it's the ALPS)
>>> that works well for smoothness and the ability to easily move the
>>> cursor except that it generates lots of "phantom clicks" as the cursor
>>> passes over buttons and links. The other driver (I'm on a different
>>> machine at the moment so I don't know the name) doesn't generate the
>>> phantom clicks but the cursor movement is jerky.
>>> 
>>> The weird thing is that all the hard-stuff work in SuSE. The DVD
>>> burner, the display, the power management, basically everything. But a
>>> seemingly simple thing like the "mouse device" (glide pad) is slightly
>>> dorked.
>> 
>> That does seem rather odd, doesn't it. Possibly touchpads are a bit less
>> standard than other types of kit on a laptop.
>> 
>> I've got a built-in card reader on mine which has never shown signs of
>> working in SUSE; I don't know if it's even possible to get it to work. But
>> that at least doesn't afeect the day-to-day working of the machine, it's
>> just an extra it would be nice to have.
> 
> 
> I have never come across built-in card readers (Flash/SD?), but why not make
> use of the PCMCIA slot or USB-based card readers? These are the more
> standard ways of getting things to work, as oppose to relying on a
> model-specific slot that is probably integrated onto the motherboard or is
> part of the architecture (much like the drift and emergence of on-board
> modems, sound cards etc.). Perhaps it's too novel to be supported. Perhaps
> it requires a manual setup, which could otherwise have been done at the
> factory before computers were shipped.

It's the only built-in of that type I've ever come across, but it may 
become a more popular inclusion, so someone could get around to supporting
it sometime, hopefully. I've been meaning to buy a USB card reader, just
to save the batteries on my camera, but of course it's another thing to
have to carry around. A built-in reader that worked would be very useful,
and this particular one accepts several different types of card, like SD,
etc. Though external readers are pretty cheap, and do have the advantage
of being portable between machines, so there are pros and cons to both.

-- 
Kier



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