[ubuntu-uk] Warn users about dodgy hardware

[Chris Rowson]

I've been testing Lucid recently, and found that support for the ATI X1200
graphics card is pretty rubbish.

For those who aren't aware of the issues, the problem basically boils down
to ATI sending the X1200 (and a raft of other chipsets) into legacy support
despite the fact that manufacturers were still shipping laptops with them
installed. As you might expect, ATI are not maintaining the legacy driver
and as luck would have it, the driver doesn't work with newer versions of
X.Org (so anything after Ubuntu 9.04).

The community contributed driver is pretty immature, and renders my laptop
pretty much unusable. Because of this, I'm going to have to revert back to
Windows 7 (saving Ubuntu merely for the netbook unfortunately).

Anyway, my point is this....

Wouldn't it make sense to run hardware detection during the installation
process and if detected, warn users that certain hardware is known not to
work well with Ubuntu? I can imagine that Jo Public would be rather miffed
if he found after spending a lot of time installing and configuring his
system that he didn't have 3d support, or that his computer ended up running
so slowly that he couldn't use it after an hour or so? He might appreciate
it if he was told this before he wasted too much time trying to get Ubuntu
with hardware that is only going to cause him problems.

Cheers,

Chris
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