[sclug] On ultra cheap machines

[Philip Hands]

Alex Butcher <lug at assursys.co.uk> writes:

> Yeah, not too bad, thanks. Apart from blindly buying hardware with Intel
> GPUs because "they're always well-supported by Linux and Xorg"... :-)

Ah I see .. I'd not noticed that your interest was because you already
had one -- oops.

> Well, reading between the lines, it struck me that he was hoping to persuade
> Intel to get Imagination Technologies to do a better job (i.e.  something
> like the nVidia blobs with glue code) of the release for his effort.  Yes, I
> appreciate that facilitating non-Free software isn't Debian's job, but maybe
> that was what he thought was the best approach to getting something sensible
> for Ubuntu too ("upstream first", and all that).  And, of course, a
> reference implementation in Debian could be freely used by other
> non-Debian-based distros.

Sure, and I'd hope that's what he took away from the thread too -- and
Debian does facilitate the installation of quite a lot of non-free
software (it's even explicitly stated that we do that in the Social
Contract), but you'd have struggled to get a completely free driver into
wheezy at that stage in the game, so a non-free one was a non-starter
really.

If the hope was to persuade Intel, well, Ubuntu^WCanonical seems almost
in a better position there, and if they're giving up I have my doubts
about them taking any notice of what Debian does.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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