Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Heads-up: KDEers: Particularly kde3-ers,

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 6:16 AM, BRM<bm_witness@×××××.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
>
> I have to agree with Duncan on this one. (not that that's a bad thing - I've really enjoyed his insights on this thread.)

As do I.

>
> Not everyone upgrades their video card every 6 months.
> Most probably get a video card upgrade only when they buy a new computer;
> and most don't buy a new computer every other year either, probably more like 4 years or so.
>
> I typically buy a new computer about every 8 years; and most people I know are probably between 4 and 8 years.
>
> So yes, KDE4 must be able to handle older hardware as Duncan describes.
>
> Glad you have the cash to burn on more frequent updates, but you're in the minority of computer users in general.
>
> One of the things I love about gentoo is using my older hardware - my server running gentoo (and hosting portage for my internal network) is a PII 233 from 1997.
> My gentoo laptop is a Pentium M from 2003; and my desktop is an AMD64 from 2005; both run KDE3 and will be running KDE4 in time - just waiting for Gentoo to mark stable on respective architectures as I don't want to play with testing on these systems at that kind of level.
>
> And I'm sure there are plenty of users in the same boat as me. I may be a computer enthusiast, but I don't have cash to burn on "frequenty" hardware upgrades. I make the hardware I have last as long as I can - I just retired a P90 Slackware-base server last spring, but then only b/c the hard drive (from 1997) died due to the system being placed badly the truck during a move.
>
> Ben

We need better tools for creating and maintaining personal overlays.
Here is my story.

Support for old hardware has been one of the downfalls of the devs
deciding to not keep everything in portage but rather they start
weeding out software before we users have really finished using it. I
have 4 Asus Pundit-R machines which use an ATI chipset with
intergrated graphics. They are low profile machines and you cannot
just buy a new graphics controller for them. I use these machines as
MythTV frontends. (2 at my house, 2 at my parents) The machine has
S-Video outputs which drive most of our TVs and leave other inputs
free. At the time I bought the machines the Open Source radeon driver
didn't support S-Video so I had to use the ATI driver which worked
fine.

A couple of years ago ATI, in all wisdom, dropped TV Out support for
this specific chipset from their closed source driver so I was forced
to stick with the driver that was current at that time. This was OK
for awhile as it was in portage and I could just mask higher
revisions. However after awhile it turned out kernel updates forced
incompatibilities between new kernels and this old driver so I was
forced to mask newer revisions than the last one that worked with the
last radeon driver that worked.

3 months go by and portage maintainers decide to start weeding 'old'
software out and, you guessed it, they weeded out what I needed to run
this hardware. The ATI driver was gone. The kernel was gone. No
discussions, no announcements. It was just gone. A machine I could
build and run using a Gentoo 2006 install CD could no longer be built
and run using a 2008 CD.

Then I'm forced to learn about attics, building overlays, etc. It was
a mess for a long time.

Recently the Open Source driver has started to support TVOut on this
version of the Radeon hardware, so I'm now back to using Open Source,
but video quality is FAR inferior to the ATI driver, although CPU
usage is far superior so at least with OS I have a quiet machine while
watching a bad picture.

Moral of the story - don't trust portage to support your machine
tomorrow just because it works today, and don't expect portage
maintainers to care. The response you'll get, if you get one at all,
is 'be a man, create your own overlay, be responsible for your
machine, and shut up'.

From experience,
Mark