Very bad status of hardware (especially wifi) support in ubuntu, due to the too many accumulated regressions

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 11:14:34PM +0000, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> I have done all my best for that bug - sometimes really struggling to  
> gather debug information in time before e.g. sending the laptop out. As  
> soon as I have a monitor at hand I will keep on. But my laptop is not  
> the only one. Problem is that most people in academia won't even bother  
> to set up ubuntu - fancy to report a bug - if it cannot enable their vga  
> out. Don't want this to look like a bug which will be quickly fixed and  
> it's only waiting for me. This problem existed since gutsy at least and  
> I cannot be the only one experiencing it.  If so I am sorry for noise - I  
> feel like intel is being said to be the "most free-software friendly  
> hardware vendor" while they are not caring about finalising their video  
> driver, and making at least decent their wifi one. I have been  
> recommending intel hardware for first and I regret having done that.  

Mmm, there is some truth amongst your points, but it seems clear that
the path to attaining a solution here is open to your hands.  I see you
have some strong passions on this topic, and would suggest they'd be
most productively channeled into working with Intel to solve it.

I'd also suggest calibrating your expectations on FOSS-friendliness.
Compared with how unfriendly other vendors are, Intel does indeed good
marks, but it doesn't mean they're perfect, just that they're the rare
good guy in a room full of rogues.

> However, I am beginning to think that all the cases I know are i945 -  
> execpt for the aforementioned old laptop about which - frankly - I don't  
> care at all :) So perhaps "my" bug will solve most of the other ones  
> regarding VGA out.

Possibly.  VGA out issues tend to be extremely HW-specific.  I could
believe there could be a VGA out issue affecting just 945 chips.  That
said, I haven't seen the issue on the spare 945 laptop I have on hand.

Bryce