On Monday, April 18, 2011 13:11 Brian K. White wrote:
On 4/18/2011 8:27 AM, Philipp Thomas wrote:
* Insomniac (insomniac@toast2.net) [20110413 00:39]:
For some odd reason the kernel people or the suse people or whomever it was, decided to remove the part that made them work. You know, the 'fix what ain't broke' people.
It's the kernel folks, more precisely Greg Kroah-Hartman that removed the hook from the pwc driver that was needed to use the binary-only decompressor module pwcx. PWC runs without the decompressor but has limits in quality and resolution.
And removing the hook is more good than bad because remember: kernel drivers are free to do everything they want.
And the author could possibly have found a way to run the decompressor in user space which would have solved the problem with the kernel folks. Instead he choose to act more like a diva and throw the towel i.e. remove pwc from the kernel sources and quit maintaining it.
So don't blame old hardware...that's a throwback, garbage excuse to the days
of Windows - every version of it.
The blame is still on companies that try to differentiate themselves by hiding the details of their hardware or that buy 3rd party ip without the rights to open-source them.
Philipp
I know, veering off topic, the damned GMA500 chip in my Vaio-P wasted so much of my time... Even on Windows! I wanted that tiny form factor but god what a pain in the balls it was getting a working video driver, even if you didn't care about the hardware accelleration it was still tricky just to get plain-old-plain-old native text resolution and basic X.
Back on topic, I often curse this machine, and when I do, I curse Sony, Intel and PowerVR, not the few people that managed to hack and re-package the binary driver to support newer kernels and other machines a few times but rarely very well and rarely up to date and rarely (never?) for suse and not recently.
When I got this old Philips 740 webcam years ago, it naturally came with the M$ installation CD. At that time I was still dual-booting. Once I installed the software on the M$ side, I tried to use it (the webcam)...it was garbage. The picture sucked, the app that I can barely remember didn't work at all to let me take snapshots and webchat with others. I was garbage. On the Linux side, once I did all the PWC stuff, the camera was *THE* finest picture ever. Really, really clear and when used with Camstream, it worked beautifully. It put to shame the crap Philips sent for the M$ side. Now, I've got this garbage Logitech 3000 and the UVC thing garbled into the kernel(?) or wherever it is now and the picture is crap. Fuzzy, blurry and pretty much useless (useless enough that I simply don't use it anymore...what a waste). I'll say it again...the kernel people fixed what wasn't broke and took away one of the far too few things that Linux is getting working well. Two steps forward when it worked, three steps back when they didn't want it in the kernel. Now a bunch of people have hardware that worked wonderfully, sitting on their desktops gathering dust and people acting exactly the same as M$ users did and still do by telling anyone who complains about it to 'get new <insert hardware/software/crap here>!'. It's nothing but a shame, truly. -- "Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." -Isaac Asimov -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org