I was having a discussion yesterday with a reviewer who appears not so familiar with SUSE. She was trying to install openSUSE on a 7-year old Toshiba laptop with the Trident Cyberblade XPi chipset. She found that after many struggles with initial installation, she was able to get a desktop, but it was small, and surrounded by “lots of black space”.
As a fix, she dropped in an xorg.conf file from a Vector Linux Light distro. Apparently it had some special settings based on bug-fixes Vector had contributed to “upstream code”. I told her I thought this was a bad idea, but she insisted she was right and that xorg.conf files are “distro agnostic”. Not unexpectedly, she experienced numerous crashes and lockups while trying to run KDE applications and abiword on this machine.
Two questions -
Has anyone got experience with how to configure this chipset? She claims that it is no longer supported on Linux by the manufacturer, is “VESA-noncompliant”, and is not supported in “upstream X code”.
She claims she did not ask for help from the openSUSE forum because “it would take too long”. I think her bigger problems were choice of unsupported hardware and choice of configuration rather than response time, but I wanted to throw this out to see if anyone had suggestions?
Here is the review; look in the comments section or respond to my post if you would like more info: First look at openSUSE 11.2.
She’s a clueless idiot. You can quote me on that one, remember to spell my name correctly.
xorg.conf are DEFINITELY NOT distribution agnostic, several distributions add specific changes to the base template in order to work around certain issues, usually driver related.
In this she’s completely right, the Trident card is in absolutely no way supposed by the stock Xorg without some extensive stabbing.
Also quick peek at the openSUSE HCL reveals that none of those old chips are supported. Something she could have confirmed in less than 30 seconds.
Her biggest problem was picking completely Linux incompatible hardware and then blaming the system for not running it, despite already knowing it was broken-from-start.
I made some of these points with her, but she was getting strong support from some of her fans like Red Hat employee Adam Williamson, who completely agreed with her “distro agnostic” claim about xorg.conf. Thank you for confirming my suspicions in this regard.
I agree, the Hardware Compatability List is extensive - I don’t know why she wouldn’t check that prior to attempting an install on such old hardware.
I just love being called a “clueless idiot” by people who either didn’t read what I wrote or else really don’t know what they are talking about. Don’t you?
The (now defunct) Toshiba laptop with the Trident CyberBlade XPi chipset did NOT experience any crashes or hangups or indeed any other significant problems with openSUSE 11.2. That was an HP Mini 110 netbook which IS supposed to be supported. Indeed, openSUSE was touting it’s improved netbook compatibility in version 11.2. The only issue with the Toshiba was that the installer did not correctly identify and configure the graphics chip, something MANY other Linux distributions do just fine, including Ubuntu and, yes, Vector Linux.
xorg.conf files are just configuration files. They are absolutely, positively distro agnostic. Yes, some distros have different default configurations but it is still just a config file which works precisely the same way in each and every Linux distribution. Folks who say otherwise are the ones who need to do some research and get a clue. The xorg.conf I dropped into my openSUSE 11.2 install worked absolutely, positively as it was supposed to without a moment’s trouble.
Regarding the Trident chipset being “completely Linux incompatible hardware” is utter nonsense. It worked with almost every Linux distro I threw at it. I should, therefore, have a reasonable expectation that it should have worked with openSUSE and, save for the installer, it did.
Of course, if you bothered to read what I wrote with a clear head instead of working yourselves up into a lather because I dared find flaw in your favorite distro, you would have known that.
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> Of course, if you bothered to read what I wrote with a clear head
> instead of working yourselves up into a lather because I dared find flaw
> in your favorite distro, you would have known that.
>
>
Forgive me the question:
Just out of curiousity: What did you wrote? Looking at this thread you do
not appear (except with this post, which is shown as your first one), so the
context is unclear (did you have a different login name?).