[SWLUG] Working around broken hardware (was: MY EYES!)

[Steve Hill]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009, Emyr Derfel wrote:

> I don't see "switch distros" as being that bad a suggestion; some are 
> known to work better with unusual pieces of hardware than what used to 
> be mainstream distros.

It's probably more accurate to say that different distributions sometimes 
have different bugs, so if you have a problem with a specific distribution 
taking a dislike to some of your hardware, you might benefit from a 
different distro... then again, the different distro might make things 
worse too - try it and see.  If one works better than the other then it 
would also be good to work out why so that the problem can be fixed.


While we're on the subject of hardware problems, does anyone know what the 
current kernel policy is for workarounds for broken hardware?

My laptop has a minor ACPI bug; I know the old idea of recompiling the 
DSDT has fallen out of favour these days, but how are these sorts of bugs 
now expected to be worked around?

I have done some debugging and have come up with a workaround for the 
problem, but the attitude I've been faced with is basically "the BIOS is 
broken, the vendor needs to fix that rather than us putting workarounds in 
the kernel" - a wonderful idea, but it completely misses the point that 
the vendor (Acer) doesn't actually _care_ so it isn't going to get fixed 
(Acer seem to have stopped responding to my emails about the problem now 
too).

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence