On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 06:50, Richard Basile wrote: > I am brand new to Linux. I've been working in tech since 1990, oracle, > unix, blah blah blah... but had been running M$ on my personal desktop > until 2 weeks ago. In the last two weeks, I've played around with > fedora, white box, knoppix, debian, and mandrake. Each distro has its > own quirks on my system. Either audio works, or ethernet works, but > never both... depending on the distro. With knoppix, video didn't > work. I guess my hardware is just to new for linux (asus mobo, marvell > on-board gigabit, fx 5700 video). > > My point in saying all this is that the pundits are right... linux is > not ready for the personal desktop of the average consumer. I may have > the background to be able to trudge the road of uncertainty, but my > mother isn't going to be running linux anytime soon. ---- The problem is that there are so many motherboards with so many different chip sets that in some cases, not all devices are properly identified. The same holds true with Windows XP installation, I get a number of devices that aren't automatically recognized during installation - the difference is that the motherboard manufacturer includes a cd with the drivers to patch Windows. It seems to me that your conclusion would be entirely different if you looked at the problem another way...if you asked ASUS, etc. why they aren't working with open source to make their hardware recognized or to provide you with patches to make it work right. Or perhaps you could become part of the open source movement and work with the bugzilla system and help the developers/maintainers with the resolution of your problem so that something is learned in the process. Otherwise, you can go back to Windows, contribute nothing, learn nothing and continue your contribution towards paying and repaying for software with more and more restrictive licensing. Craig
