DMA

[Scott]

On 05/23/2006 03:26 PM, * Jeff Waugh spake thusly:
> <quote who="Sean Hammond">

> 
> DMA really is a more/less magic setting. Why burden the user with that
> choice?

Let me put it this way. Without it enabled my CD/DVD drives were
horrendously slow.  To say that burning/ripping/playing/accessing a
CD/DVD in Windows was much faster would be a gross understatement.

I got a ton of I/O errors (especially on one of my drives) that never
occurred under Windows.

Once I figured out how to enable DMA in Linux, my drives performed as
intended.

This support of "legacy hardware" is starting to get old (and Microsoft
is guilty of this too, but that's supposedly changing with Vista). At
what point does certain hardware just simply become obsolete and
unsupported?

At least this isn't Debian.  I've run etch before and became frustrated
when I couldn't upgrade some software on my AMD64 (running i686 Kernel)
because the versions for MIPS, Apple II, Commodore 64, i8088, m68k &
Commodore Pet wouldn't compile....

Someone needs to produce a free (as in open source and no cost) (Desktop
Linux distro "for the rest of us" (as Apple used to say).

Who are the rest of us?  The majority of us with computers less than 5-6
years old, that can play and burn DVDs and CDs, DMA for our drives, at
least 256 MB of RAM and have an Intel Celeron/Pentium 4 (or later),
PowerPC or AMD Sempron/Athlon/Athlon 64 CPUs.

I'd guess that this would comprise about 85% of us dontcha think?



-- 
	Scott
www.angrykeyboarder.com
©2006 angrykeyboarder™ & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved