Improving FreeBSD's hardware compatibility

[Oliver Fromme]

Intron wrote:
 > Peter Jeremy wrote:
 > > Getting action from vendors has been unsuccessful in the past - the
 > > Free OS community (Linux + *BSD) is too small for vendors to be
 > > concerned about.
 > 
 > I cannot agree with you. Linux has achieved much more support from
 > hardware vendors than FreeBSD.

Interestingly, when I looked for a new laptop last year,
it turned out that the number of laptops that ran FreeBSD
was greater than those that ran Linux.  (I finally chose
a Samsung X20-XVM 1600-V, which works perfectly fine for
me except for the built-in winmodem [which I don't need
anyway].  A Linux live CD didn't even boot on it.)

 > You may look in Linux source code.
 > In linux-2.6.x/drivers/, there are so many hardware drivers.

Yeah, most of which are crap.  :-)   The raw number of
drivers says _nothing_ about hardware vendors' support.

 > > I suspect the best solution is to publicise configurations that are
 > > known to work and what problems exist with other configurations.

I tend to agree with Peter here.  By the way, a very good
resource for hardware support information is the search
facility at Rambler:  http://freebsd.rambler.ru/

Best regards
   Oliver

PS:  I think this thread might be inappropriate for the
-hackers list.  How about moving it to either -hardware
or -chat?  (I watch them all, so either is fine with me.)

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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