i give up

[Beech Rintoul]

On Friday 28 November 2008 20:41:55 you wrote:
> It's been two-three months now since I bought this new machine, and I'm
> no closer to seeing any solution to the failure on FreeBSD's part to
> recognize and/or utilize my SATA controller.  I've been monitoring the
> lists and the CVS repo, even offering suggestions as to how I might help
> to resolve this issue, but no one seems to be interested in helping me
> to get this thing working.

Even microsoft sometimes suffers with this problem. A friend of mine went out 
and bought vista when it was first released and wanted to upgrade from xp. I 
told him it was a bad idea and he should wait but no, he installed it anyway. 
To make a long story short it was missing several drivers that were 
unavailable. The main difference is microsoft has millions to throw at 
development and most of the vendors by the balls to write drivers. It still 
took 3 months to finally get all the vista drivers he needed. 

I just built a new quad core machine, but was careful to buy a MB and video 
card I knew would play nicely with FreeBSD. I also bought a SATA DVD drive 
knowing it probably wasn't going to work, but it was on sale so I bought it 
anyway. I knew that there was development going on for SATA drives and it 
would probably work eventually. And sure enough with the 4 month old -CURRENT 
snapshot I first loaded it didn't. However when I updated -CURRENT to the 
latest a couple of weeks ago the drive now works fine. So development is 
happening but in the open source world it sometimes isn't as fast as we'd like 
for our favorite piece of hardware.

I would never buy an off the shelf box without: 1: Doing a lot of homework and 
talking to others to make sure everything is supported. And 2: Has a return 
policy if it doesn't play nicely. You don't have to tell them you're going to 
put FreeBSD on it, but if it turns out bad you just restore windows and return 
the box.

Sorry you got bit, but Linux is not immune from it either and you might find 
yourself trading one problem for another.

Beech

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Beech Rintoul - FreeBSD Developer - beech at FreeBSD.org
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