[2510] in Release_7.7_team
I made a booboo with the Dell Optiplex 150 config.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Dec 8 00:55:58 2000
Message-ID: <cuA7TVlz0001BzsHEX@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 05:55:45 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: owls@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
CC: bass@MIT.EDU, Susan_Green@Dell.com, Jim_Garrett@Dell.com,
nicole_hennessey@hp.com, ceagan@hpbstore.com
One interesting side effect of my HP partnership is that sometimes I get
to retrace with HP steps I make with Dell.
It turned out that HP hired LinuxCare to certify their new product line
for RedHat Linux 6.2. The detail is that the i815e graphics chip set on
the motherboard requires a patch, and a recompile of the X server
shipped with RedHat 6.2.
I had been assuming that the i815e was the motherboard set, not the
graphics chip set, and that i810e was the video on the Dell Optiplex
GX150. Whoops! It's the unsupported i815e on both.
We have two alternatives:
1. Revise the Try and Buy with Dell to ask them to add the NVIDIA card.
2. Do more work with release engineering to patch Athena to support the
i815e on-board video.
Dell and HP redesign their hardware for the best price performance.
They pre-install Windows with the latest drivers to finesse the issue of
maintaining continuity. Linux is not a pre-installed OS.
Clearly it is unreasonable to expect the video and sound on the
motherboard to always be backward compatible. There will be a lag.
Could vendors at least agree to offer end users add-on cards so that
when the hardware product line changes, a system can be configured that
will run the same certified OS rev that the previous product line
supported?
Dell offers a GX150 configuration with a third party video card that
will PROBABLY work with Red Hat 6.2 without special effort (assuming the
NVIDIA TNT2 now being sold will still work with the existing Linux
NVIDIA TNT 2 drivers. (ATI and S3 had a nasty habit of keeping the card
name the same but changing all the chips and breaking Linux support.)
HP, on the other hand???
-wdc
