[sclug] On ultra cheap machines

[Philip Hands]

Hi Alex,

I hope life's treating you well.

Alex Butcher <lug at assursys.co.uk> writes:
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, David Given wrote:
>
>> On 25/04/13 21:27, Alex Butcher wrote:
>>> On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, David Given wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Sounds like something like an N2800 Atom desktop board (e.g. Intel
>>> DN2800MT)
>>> might do the job.
>>
>> I had totally failed to find those earlier as the box shifters file them
>> under 'miniITX' rather than 'motherboards'. Sigh. But yes, that's the
>> sort of thing I was thinking of.
>>
>> [...]
>>> Only downside is that the binary graphics drivers need antique
>>> versions of the kernel and xorg...
>>
>> He's mainly an Ubuntu user; and for all their (many) sins, Ubuntu do a
>> decent job of supporting weird and proprietary graphics hardware out of
>> the box; any ideas if they're supporting it yet?
>
> They do; it's where I ported my Fuduntu packages from. I don't speak Ubuntu,
> so here's a couple of links which should be of use.
>
> <https://launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/cedarview>
> <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1953734&page=10&p=11976680#post11976680>
> <http://ef.gy/ubuntu-cedarview-drivers>
>
> Some background:
> <https://gist.github.com/Aissen/2925633>
>
> Note especially:
>
> "They don't even make 64 bit windows drivers for the machines.  Also, the
> drivers will only ever work in 12.04 (where they will soon be uploaded to
> for 12.04.1),
>
> They wont update them for 12.10 and newer. Sorry to bear the bad news but
> these machines are an absolute nightmare and this was the best we could get
> :("
>   -- <http://communities.intel.com/message/160444#160444>
>
> Supposedly, there is/was an Intel-sponsored attempt to get drivers into
> Debian: <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/12/msg00330.html>, but
> the Debian devs bikeshedded him away, it seems...

I don't think it's bikeshedding to point out that they missed the
freeze:

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/12/msg00331.html

Given that the drivers in question are proprietary, they will _never_ be
in Debian main anyway ... they could however be in the non-free section,
but I don't see why you'd expect Debian to make exceptions to the
release process for non-free software.

Your other comments, and Ubuntu's inability to maintain support for this
driver, makes me think that any effort spent forcing this drivel into
the release would be wasted at best, and might inflict bugs that are
impossible to fix on our users for the next couple of years, followed by
no upgrade path after that.

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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