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Re: [gNewSense-users] A user's view


From: Sam Geeraerts
Subject: Re: [gNewSense-users] A user's view
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2013 01:18:38 +0100

Op Fri, 27 Dec 2013 02:57:59 -0200
schreef Guilherme Vieira <address@hidden>:

> Stallman says all the time that "the GNU community is great, you can
> ask them anything and they'll come up with a solution." Well, I've
> explained my HDMI problems in this list before, but nobody answered.
> I know gNewSense is a small distro with a small, very busy community,
> but oh man, *how can an HDMI output not work?* This is so *shameful*.
> How can "grandma with her Yeeloong" use this system if the HDMI
> output needs troubleshooting?

I did read your email about your HDMI problem. It was obvious you
are capable of tracing the bug pretty far into the system and I could
not think of a way to help you any further.

I've been fortunate that I've not had to deal with HDMI (and the
HDCP that comes with it) yet. Choosing my hardware carefully makes me
less in touch with what grandma may have spinning under/on her desk.
Avoiding HDMI is becoming less of an option each day and I suspect that
in your case it's not so much HDMI in itself that is the problem, but
rather the graphics card (or the motherboard) as a whole. That's hard
to debug without having the machine at hand and some intimate knowledge
of Xorg, Linux and the hardware type in brain.

> Seriously, there has got to be a community of people who focus on this
> issue. WHERE IS IT? I'll throw at them all the money I've got and
> I'll help with everything in my reach, but it's gotta exist first.
>
> A community that will pick, say, Xorg, and say "okay, we will make
> this work on such and such and such platforms, and it will be
> guaranteed to work and be tested on those platforms, and you will be
> allowed to change such and such configuration parameters and that's
> it." Such configuration parameters should be grandma-friendly, be
> incapable of bricking the graphical interface, and have a graphical
> interface to tweak them. It shall be called Xorg-unf**ked or
> Xorg-that-actually-works.

I think good (or at least publicly available) hardware specs would go a
long way in solving graphics problems. If you want to spend money, give
it to projects that create hardware with freedom/openness as a core
value [1].

> I won't turn back anymore. I've made a vow that I will only use libre
> software and I'll play by it, forever. I'll work around issues when I
> can, actually fix stuff when I can't work around them (I *did* debug
> my GPU kernel objects before giving up,) and I'll plainly accept that
> some technologies are out of reach when all of that fails (which is
> what happened to my HDMI output.)
> 
> When Xorg was unstable and I couldn't figure why, I almost fell back
> to the Linux console. I already use vim anyway, so I intended to use
> a framebuffer browser there, such as Firefox with GTK on DirectFB and
> play music using mpd and such. Luckily, I found a way to work around
> the problem, at the cost of my external monitor. I guess everything
> has a price :) I'm willing to go very far for freedom, as you can see.

Excellent.

> But I do wonder: How is everybody using GNU and managing not to be as
> pissed up as I am? By God, what am I missing? I used to blog about the
> problems I encountered in my GNU adventures here (but stopped):
> n2liquid.wordpress.com/category/gnu-drama/.

Some paranoid GNU/Linux users say that these kinds of blogs are written
by Microsoft puppets. Myth busted. :)

> P.S.: Please don't take this too personally. I know the gNewSense
> community can only do so much, and I'm glad it does what it does (it
> *is* my distro of choice, after all,) but I really, really need to
> take this out of my chest from time to time. And I wanted to meet
> good counter arguments to all that or like-minded people who want to
> try to solve this problem somehow.

Thanks for your faith in the gNewSense community. We do what we can.

[1] http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Main_Page



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