On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 16:48, dep wrote:
okay, granted. and if the purpose of the exercise is assigning blame, the job is done. if, however, the purpose of the exercise is getting
Indeed. This whole conversation is funny. Under Win2k my current computer had ALL kinds of problems with ACPI. For starters I couldn't use my network card with my sound card because they conflicted. ACPI couldn't handle these two particular models for some unexplained reason. And thus I got blue screens constantly in Windows and always had to turn ACPI off in Win2k (it defaults to ON there as well and Microsoft is a slightly bigger company than SuSE) to get my machine to work properly. Incidentally, the same exact computer has ran EXCELLENT under SuSEs 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2. So I guess my point is that SuSE isn't alone in having problems with ACPI. And in fact in many cases as crappy as the Linux implementation is (which also isn't SuSE's fault, they don't write all the software that goes into the distro) for some of us it works better than Windows.
suse running on customers' machines, then acpi defaulting to off, with documentation describing how to turn it on, would seem to be the right thing to do, don't you agree?
Not sure. In my experience no. But based on the anecdotal evidence of the problems others have had, yes. There's also the whole "I want to turn off ACPI and turn on APM" thing as well. Someone somewhere needs to make this easier in general. Not sure if that's SuSE's responsibility, though, since I have yet to see a distro that handles this elegantly.
the reason acpi is broken in so many places is that intel, toshiba, and microsoft corporation have every reason to keep the standard just far enough out of reach that it is not easy for other companies to embrace. it would seem that an open source company, of all organizations, would understand and sympathize with this.
That's kind of the point. Like all Linux companies and organizations (including the actual development teams) they work with what they're given, which often isn't much. I don't think you can blame them for trying, especially when they generally come so close these days. Were you were around for the "don't even bother with sound, good luck setting up X-Windows via the Motif-based application" days of like Red Hat 4? If you were, like I was, you might have an appreciation of how humorous it is to complain about something like this, considering how far Linux has come. Preston