Supermicro Hardware and FreeBSD

[Tom Vilot]

Tm4528 at aol.com wrote:

>I don't think he was calling the members of this list stupid. 
>

You are correct. He wasn't.

Rather, it was the people who *developed* the *free* and very powerful 
operating system (that he is attempting to use) he called stupid. I'm 
still waiting to see him post an apology.

I, for one, am humbled by the BSD teams. They do work I don't believe I 
could ever do, regardless of my 15 years of work in software.

>Only that  not supporting major chipsets and whining about not having the funding
>nor the contacts to get a $250 Mobo as an excuse was "Stupid".  This is 
>not a new chipset. Its been out for months and months. 
>

Really?

Gee, so has my Linksys Wireless G card. In fact, I am fairly sure it's 
been out for more than a year. Guess what? It's not supported on FreeBSD 
4.10 either. It *is* on 5.3 via ndis (which I was thrilled to discover). 
Kinda sounds like the situation with these SuperMicro boards.

If it was *that* important to me to run this particular 802.11g card on 
FreeBSD 4.10, I *would* donate or loan it to a kernel developer. And 
that is perfectly reasonable advice.

The fact that he's in Russia is of no consequence. His email address is 
hardcodeharry at yahoo.com. We're supposed to just psychically *know* 
that's a Russian domain and his net income for three months is what I 
earn in an hour?

Open Sound doesn't work on 4.10. Only on 5.3. Am I going to complain to 
4Front Technologies that they are "stupid"? I think not.

Besides ... with a name like hardcodeharry, I would expect a little more 
intelligence; a little more willingness to dig into things. A slight 
tendency to ask the question: "how can I hack this code to work, and how 
would I contribute those modifications to the BSD team?"

But I see none of that.

In short: troll.

Anyone with a reasonable desire to use any of the *nixes would have 
enough smarts to know:

1. check the hardware compatibility lists to determine whether or not 
the hardware you want to run is going to work with the particular *nix 
you want to use. This is no different between BSD and Linux, Solaris, etc.

2. Don't expect every damn piece of hardware out there to work out of 
the box with an older version of the kernel for the given *nix. This is 
NOT WINDOWS (thank god) and just because you have a particular piece of 
hardware doesn't mean it's going to work. It is your responsibility to 
know this and to work with it.

3. Ask questions politely in the appropriate forums, and be civil. 
Failing to do so is probably not going to get your question answered.

I for one was drafting a post for this list thanking *everyone* on it 
for being the kind of terrific help they are when  Boris' post appeared. 
The kind of discourse I see on this list (and on other BSD oriented 
lists) is a huge and welcome contrast to the childish banter I see on 
most of the Linux (and MacOS and Windows) discussion lists out there. It 
is like  the kind of professional enthusiasm I remember on the BeOS lists.

As a result ... please pardon me if I am intolerant of behavior and 
attitudes that sound to me like that which I left behind when I put 
FreeBSD on my laptop and two servers ....