Shoutout to screenshot tools
Way back in the olde tymes, I was having trouble with the NIC driver in my Linux install. I posted a question about it on USENET, and got a reply from the guy who wrote the drivers. He asked for some info about the card, then updated the driver to support it.
There used to be a lot of cards based on same or similar chips, but with small differences. That made little changes to drivers common. It’s a bit like LCD modules or audio chipset quirks. One driver with tons of little differences depending on what each manufacturer decided to do differently.
Yeah, I know, that’s why the kernel with the drivers is not more than 150MB. Otherwise, you’d have the Windows situation where driverpacks compressed with 7z (LZMA2, solid archive, 273 word dictionary size and 2GB decompression memory, which requires about 128GB of RAM to compress) take about 30GB.
You have to pack the driver from each manufacturer because of signatures, even though they might even be the same with other drivers in the pack… but, REV differs and oh well, the driver installer doesn’t recognize that driver as a valid one for that device.
The worst of these is Bluetooth. I bought a USB dongle with a chipset said to be compatible.(CSR 8510 A10) Then I found it was a knockoff version of the chipset with some weird ass quirks that make it incompatible with the official drivers. To this day it’s the one thing I never bothered to try and fix, even though others have succeeded in making the fix. The fix wasn’t something I could easily turn into a DKMS module as I have no idea how to do that, and as a result it had to be compile with the kernel manually and I want ready to go diving into kernel and at the same time also trying to work out exactly what the quirks were.
I eventually bought a dongle with a chipset that worked was either not a knockoff or it was a perfect reproduction. It worked flawlessly, and I’ve bought more since then for PCs with no Bluetooth support.
Back in the day I was running GLTron on an Athlon 1800+ w/Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (I think?) and I was running dual monitors. GLTron didn’t like using both screens since it presented as a peculiar resolution. So I emailed the GLTron dude and he quickly emailed me a patch that let me run the game across both monitors (bezels not an issue because I was doing multiplayer split screen).
What a great game.
For all we know, he does wear a cape.
Break away fasteners are a thing now. Line it with some Kevlar fibre and some good thermal insulation/fire resistance and you have an amazing utility device.
In public, it billows behind you, making you look dashing and heroic. When the shit hits the fan, instant bullet resistant cover for civilians. A way to shield them from the heat of a fire, or a small explosion. You could even use it offensively to tangle or deceive an opponent!
I’d settle for a cloak. A nice leather, or heavy woollen cloak would be amazing for being outside on cold evenings.
Unfortunately, they are still seen as dark and ‘edgy’. Moreso even than a trenchcoat. ☹️
Stop giving so many fucks about what other people think about your fashion. You do you, fam.
I remember early 2020, there was a small push to bring capes back, before something else took over every discussion. Something about blue jays or crows or something
Shoutout to this guy for maintaining my mainboards temperature sensors and pwn fan headers: https://github.com/Fred78290/nct6687d
Without this and https://github.com/codifryed/coolercontrol my PC was either a jet engine from the sounds or a nuclear reactor from heat constipation.
Some dude wrote a driver for the temp sensors on my motherboard… Then quit maintining it because people were being shitty
https://github.com/a1wong/it87
DRIVER REMOVAL NOTICE ===================== I have been unable to meet support demands for this driver, resulting in unpleasant experience and frustration for everyone involved. Consequently, the driver will be removed from github, effective August 1, 2018. Interested parties are encouraged to clone the driver before that time and to start maintaining it on their own.
This guy still maintains it87: https://github.com/frankcrawford/it87
I’ve was using his for years on my old motherboard, since the mainline it87 didn’t play nicely.
Thought I should mention, he is also slowly adding his changes to the mainline kernel.
Software discoverability on linux sucks so much omg. I was looking for something like coolercontrol for almost forever and I find it now that I dont need it anymore.
Uh, really? I find it to be much easier. apt contains almost everything, and for a niche thing like yours, a Google for aio fans linux came back with the first result of a reddit thread including the above software, and liquidctl which it uses and is all over the place. I have way more trouble finding things for Windows, but maybe that’s because 98℅ of my use case isn’t gaming.
i searched it at the time and all i could ever find was fancontrol.
which is fine and solved my problem, but 99% of niche linux software i use was found through forums like lemmy, on recommendation of other nerds. hardly a good way to find it quick.
ideally searching a distros app store should find almost everything, more or less like android can do today.
A lot of Linux drivers are like this - just one or two people maintaining them. They usually eventually mainline the driver rather than having a separate Git repo though.
It’s mind boggling just thinking that things like this depend on the effort of one or two guys… while on the other hand, it’s not so uncommon that a team of engineers and developers fails to deliver a working (mostly) bugfree product.
I think management is who is responsible for the shitty decisions, as always… and, in general, just holding the team back.
What’s the deal with Nebraska? Are people from there like really polite and helpful?
The thing with drivers is that the hardware they’re written for doesn’t really change. A particular network card is always going to behave the same way. Once the driver works well, it’s pretty much complete, and the only changes that are needed are bug fixes, updates to handle new firmware, or adjustments if the kernel changes some implementation detail of how drivers are used. There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
There could be months or years between updates to the driver.
Yes, but someone still has to implement that “a thing or two” in it every few years.
Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.
Agreed. But, to be honest, most aren’t. Just take a look at Realtek. There’s bound to be at least one chip made by them on your board (in most cases, two, LAN and audio, two very crucial pieces of hardware).
