Quote Originally Posted by heffeque
If Linux is such a great Operating System... why is it so dificul to make a new piece of harware work? Shouldn't it be easy for nVidia & ATi with all those great engenieres they have to just make a simple driver that actualy works? Why is it so dificult to include the new drivers that are comming out in the newest versions of Linux? I just don't get what's so difficult about inserting a new driver in a new compilation (shrug)
I think you are making an illogical comparison here. Whether or not Linux is a great OS isn't really relevant to how well it works with hardware 'X'. I agree that nvidia & ATI should be able to put out drivers for their hardware but there is more to this issue than meets the eye. First we have to realize that there is no single 'Linux' operating system Technically, Linux is the kernel and there are many OS'a that use the Linux kernel. With these differences come many variations on everything from drivers to desktop environments. Linux tends to work best on older hardware since there has been time for someone to develop a driver for example. I have had a great deal of hardware that simply doesn't work with windows or at least not without some concentrated effort and alot of searching. In fact, M$ can't seem to get their patches to their own OS installed correctly. but that's another issue.

I built my last box with Linux in mind. It works flawlessly. I can install Knoppix or one of it's variants or even bootstrap Debian, get all the security updates, and have the desktop set up exactly as I like it in about an hour. It takes nearly an hour just to get through the reboots when you patch M$!

For many of the older machines I come across there is no M$ option since support for 95, 98 & NT is gone these OS's are IMO dead and worthless. Users of these OS's will come to rely on the same resources that we Linux users do- other users. I can however still use my old 200Mhz w 64M running Debian no problem. In fact it does some things faster than M$ ever did on faster hardware. Go figure......

I understand your frustration but I would encourage you to keep at it and hopefully you get it to work whether it be some configuration that you need to do or be it a new driver release that gets the job done. Keep in mind that your machine was built to run windows, not Linux. Maybe you'll be the one to get that hardware to work and you can write a nice how-to for others that have the same hardware.