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Hello developers, |
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for the last few years I have been maintaining |
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x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome as best as I could. I was basing most |
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of that work on my extensive use (in a workstation of sorts) of a single |
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VIA EPIA M-10000 mainboard for a period of more than seven years, but it |
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proved increasingly difficult to hang on to it. A bad case of capacitor |
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plague[1] meant that peripheral I/O functions (sound, USB, probably |
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more subsystems I wasn't even trying to use anymore) were becoming |
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increasingly unstable. Lately even booting the system was hit and miss, |
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and its dismal performance paired with having a 1600x1200 screen |
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resolution supported by a /very/ slow frame buffer had me looking for |
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a spiffy alternative. When that opportunity presented itself, I stuffed |
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the single storage device into the new system and ran with it. |
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I haven't looked back and I don't think I want to fire up the EPIA |
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again, so I can no longer maintain the graphics driver for it. Most of |
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the work on the VIA graphics drivers used to take place at a separate |
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website [2], but recently most of the work has shifted to |
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freedesktop.org[3]. The OLPC[4] project has a vested interest in |
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getting the open source driver to work, too, which is where former |
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Gentoo developer Daniel Drake[5] does more than his share of the work. |
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The last year or so has seen a lot of work put into getting DRM working |
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properly, and that holds at least some promise for the future of both |
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the hardware and its usability in Linux based systems. |
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In the last few years there have been a few occasions where the |
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unstable branch of openchrome ebuilds in the tree wouldn't work at all, |
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and there have even been cases where the stable branch had severe |
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problems that weren't noticed or fixed until I happened to stumble upon |
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them myself. VIA graphics found some use in the middle of the last |
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decade, but I guess most owners gratefully used their spare AGP or PCI |
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slots instead of the built-in graphics, or I would have seen more bug |
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reports, testing and support. The X11 team is now the principal |
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maintainer of these low maintenance ebuilds. |
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So, if you have and use the graphics hardware that this driver |
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supports, give it some care. |
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Happy hacking, |
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jer |
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague |
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[2] http://www.openchrome.org/ |
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[3] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/ |
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[4] http://one.laptop.org/ |
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[5] http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/ |