Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

[Ericg]

Can they? I think they can't, is there any generic, vesa-like KMS driver on the kernel?

Vesa-KMS is being worked on. I think I posted the link to it on the first page.

[Kivada]

Normally people don't use an old PC as their exclusive machine. I for one have a Duron as a spare which dual boots Windows ME for old PC games and has an install of Damn Small Linux on another partition for browsing the internet, email and watching the odd TV show streamed over the network.
While it only has 512MB of RAM, it runs very well with the old nforce drivers. Newer distros however run like molasses due to the excessive use of software rendering through generic drivers, even with lightweight UIs such as LXDE and EDE.
Why should I listen to your incoherent rants and ramblings and upgrade a system that works perfectly fine for me?

Because I've been refurbishing junked Windows boxes with Linux for about a decade to donate and I wouldn't even bother donating a box that has less then 1.2Gb of ram and I don't even bother with the slower Pentium4 and Athlon CPUs these days. Priority parts to find: 64-bit CPUs, ram, R300 or Nvidia Geforce 6000 series or newer discrete GPUs, mobos with a Radeon X1200 series or an Nvidia 6100 series or newer IGP, mobos with 4 ram slots are of a higher priority. You get the picture? I usually collect 5-6 dumpster dived boxes before I dig through them and the drawers of parts I have and make 1-3 boxes that would be semi useful to someone that isn't a basement dwelling nerd. To date I've donated something like 35-40 Linux boxes, I have sold and traded a bunch more though.

The boxes you describe I wouldn't even give away.

The oldest thing I keep in active duty around the house is an Athlon64 3500+ Clawhammer w/ 2Gb of ram and my old 8800GTS as the public browser/spare gaming box, since it holds up surprisingly well even with modern titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Legend Of Grimrock and Dungeon Defenders even at 1920x1200 with max settings if I leave out AA and AF, the CPU even manages to handle 720p playback of H.264 and WebM. The only games that I've tried on it that seem to be a bit too heavy are Half Life2 and Team Fortress2, I know for a fact that it could never run DOTA2 though.

The only 15 year old hardware I would even consider keeping would be a dual socket 1.4Ghz Pentium3-S w/ DDR ram, such systems existed, but IIRC they where exceedingly rare as there was only one dual socket board with DDR ram and the 1.4Ghz P3-S was a very expensive chip, so getting 2 would be a rarity.

[duby229]

Because I've been refurbishing junked Windows boxes with Linux for about a decade to donate and I wouldn't even bother donating a box that has less then 1.2Gb of ram and I don't even bother with the slower Pentium4 and Athlon CPUs these days. Priority parts to find: 64-bit CPUs, ram, R300 or Nvidia Geforce 6000 series or newer discrete GPUs, mobos with a Radeon X1200 series or an Nvidia 6100 series or newer IGP, mobos with 4 ram slots are of a higher priority. You get the picture? I usually collect 5-6 dumpster dived boxes before I dig through them and the drawers of parts I have and make 1-3 boxes that would be semi useful to someone that isn't a basement dwelling nerd. To date I've donated something like 35-40 Linux boxes, I have sold and traded a bunch more though.

The boxes you describe I wouldn't even give away.

The oldest thing I keep in active duty around the house is an Athlon64 3500+ Clawhammer w/ 2Gb of ram and my old 8800GTS as the public browser/spare gaming box, since it holds up surprisingly well even with modern titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Legend Of Grimrock and Dungeon Defenders even at 1920x1200 with max settings if I leave out AA and AF, the CPU even manages to handle 720p playback of H.264 and WebM. The only games that I've tried on it that seem to be a bit too heavy are Half Life2 and Team Fortress2, I know for a fact that it could never run DOTA2 though.

The only 15 year old hardware I would even consider keeping would be a dual socket 1.4Ghz Pentium3-S w/ DDR ram, such systems existed, but IIRC they where exceedingly rare as there was only one dual socket board with DDR ram and the 1.4Ghz P3-S was a very expensive chip, so getting 2 would be a rarity.

completely off topic, but AF is almost free, you can leave it on 16x with almost no difference. if you don't believe me then run some benches and see it for yourself.

I refurbish PCs too. I go a bit older than you, but not much. But I spend most of my time refurbing laptops. Cool thing about refurbing laptops is, even if you can't make a useable system out of it you can still piece it out on ebay, even right down to the screw sets.

[Ericg]

Normally people don't use an old PC as their exclusive machine. I for one have a Duron as a spare which dual boots Windows ME for old PC games and has an install of Damn Small Linux on another partition for browsing the internet, email and watching the odd TV show streamed over the network.
While it only has 512MB of RAM, it runs very well with the old nforce drivers. Newer distros however run like molasses due to the excessive use of software rendering through generic drivers, even with lightweight UIs such as LXDE and EDE.
Why should I listen to your incoherent rants and ramblings and upgrade a system that works perfectly fine for me?

As Duby and Kivada point out Intellivision...you are the exception TO the exception. I would say that Duby, Kivada, I, and others who handle refurbed PC's are the beginning exception, and then you go beyond even us. We are the 1%, you're that .01% that people talk about. I work in a computer shop, we do charity work, give computers away sometimes. As much of a cheap bastard as my boss is (and dear GOD is he cheap) He still won't give anything away that has less than 1Gb of RAM because he knows its not even USEFUL in this day and age.

So you go ahead and pat yourself on the head for keeping an old computer alive... But don't get mad at us and everyone else for knowing when its time to let go and let something die.

[erendorn]

As Duby and Kivada point out Intellivision...you are the exception TO the exception. I would say that Duby, Kivada, I, and others who handle refurbed PC's are the beginning exception, and then you go beyond even us. We are the 1%, you're that .01% that people talk about. I work in a computer shop, we do charity work, give computers away sometimes. As much of a cheap bastard as my boss is (and dear GOD is he cheap) He still won't give anything away that has less than 1Gb of RAM because he knows its not even USEFUL in this day and age.

So you go ahead and pat yourself on the head for keeping an old computer alive... But don't get mad at us and everyone else for knowing when its time to let go and let something die.

Would such older, sub 1/2Gb RAM machines be "useful" in less developed countries, and would there be a demand there? (I don't refurbish and I don't live there so genuine question)

[GreatEmerald]

Can they? I think they can't, is there any generic, vesa-like KMS driver on the kernel?

There's xf86-video-modesetting, but I think it requires another driver to provide KMS...

Because I've been refurbishing junked Windows boxes with Linux for about a decade to donate and I wouldn't even bother donating a box that has less then 1.2Gb of ram and I don't even bother with the slower Pentium4 and Athlon CPUs these days. Priority parts to find: 64-bit CPUs, ram, R300 or Nvidia Geforce 6000 series or newer discrete GPUs, mobos with a Radeon X1200 series or an Nvidia 6100 series or newer IGP, mobos with 4 ram slots are of a higher priority. You get the picture? I usually collect 5-6 dumpster dived boxes before I dig through them and the drawers of parts I have and make 1-3 boxes that would be semi useful to someone that isn't a basement dwelling nerd. To date I've donated something like 35-40 Linux boxes, I have sold and traded a bunch more though.

The boxes you describe I wouldn't even give away.

The oldest thing I keep in active duty around the house is an Athlon64 3500+ Clawhammer w/ 2Gb of ram and my old 8800GTS as the public browser/spare gaming box, since it holds up surprisingly well even with modern titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Legend Of Grimrock and Dungeon Defenders even at 1920x1200 with max settings if I leave out AA and AF, the CPU even manages to handle 720p playback of H.264 and WebM. The only games that I've tried on it that seem to be a bit too heavy are Half Life2 and Team Fortress2, I know for a fact that it could never run DOTA2 though.

The only 15 year old hardware I would even consider keeping would be a dual socket 1.4Ghz Pentium3-S w/ DDR ram, such systems existed, but IIRC they where exceedingly rare as there was only one dual socket board with DDR ram and the 1.4Ghz P3-S was a very expensive chip, so getting 2 would be a rarity.

We still have one PC that is using a GeForce 2 MX400 and 384 MiB RAM (it's not DDR RAM, it's one of those RAMs that were before even that) in the company whose computers I'm maintaining. But it's running a time-frozen Windows XP that isn't connected to the network. The reason why it's still kept around is for legacy connectivity – it has an LPT port which is required for a label printer we have, and since it's running 32-bit Windows, it is also capable of running 16-bit installers for legacy applications. I even installed an USB expansion card into it (made by VIA, actually) just a week ago, since it is usually given the task of scanning documents as well. Oh, and it also has a floppy drive, which we used for embroidery purposes until last week, when I switched the system to use CompactFlash instead of floppies. Of course I wouldn't even think of running any modern Linux distribution on it and expect it to work.

[chithanh]

And if you want to watch a video?

As you correctly wrote it is necessary to use external software to watch videos. But that is typically not the purpose of keeping such old machines running. The purpose is to allow them to continue doing what they were doing fine in all those years.

Nor does it appear to have ad blocking so that when a site loads 700 .gif ads it doesn't eat all of your aforementioned 256Mb of ram.

Netsurf handles animated gifs fine too, even on low-end boxes. If you think it becomes unbearable, install an ad-blocking proxy.

Clearly you didn't live in the same area that I did, here the students stole or vandalized every piece of equipment, no matter how new or old it was, the school had gear ranging from Apple IIe's and 286 boxes all the way up to indigo iMacs.

Vandalism would invariably happen, and in the two days it took for staff to notice, get another 386 from the attic (from the two dozen or so), insert the boot installation floppy and wait for the install to finish, the students would have one fewer terminal to browse the web, check their emails or communicate via instant messaging. So there was remarkable self-control among the students because those who decided to kick the computer off the table, cut the mouse cord, pour soda into the keyboard, block the PSU fan with a stick or decorate the screen with permanent ink were soon met with contempt by their peers.

[curaga]

You act like that wouldn't still be faster then what he was claiming to be running, The HD8330 with current state OSS drivers would still be far faster then a Rage128 from around 15 years ago.

?

My point was that there's a disadvantage to buying a Kabini as an open source user over buying the previous iteration. I'm not going to buy anything that uses radeonsi until the quality is equivalent.

[Kivada]

As you correctly wrote it is necessary to use external software to watch videos. But that is typically not the purpose of keeping such old machines running. The purpose is to allow them to continue doing what they were doing fine in all those years.
Netsurf handles animated gifs fine too, even on low-end boxes. If you think it becomes unbearable, install an ad-blocking proxy.

As I said, the boxes aren't for someone that reads this site, they are for people that don't know what they are doing but need a computer for whatever reason but don't need something Windows specific.

This was in the late 90's, most students didn't use the school computers for much, even fewer had an email address. The self policing was looking out for the guy walking out the door with an iMac, a projector or a 30" TV.

We still have one PC that is using a GeForce 2 MX400 and 384 MiB RAM (it's not DDR RAM, it's one of those RAMs that were before even that) in the company whose computers I'm maintaining. But it's running a time-frozen Windows XP that isn't connected to the network. The reason why it's still kept around is for legacy connectivity ? it has an LPT port which is required for a label printer we have, and since it's running 32-bit Windows, it is also capable of running 16-bit installers for legacy applications. I even installed an USB expansion card into it (made by VIA, actually) just a week ago, since it is usually given the task of scanning documents as well. Oh, and it also has a floppy drive, which we used for embroidery purposes until last week, when I switched the system to use CompactFlash instead of floppies. Of course I wouldn't even think of running any modern Linux distribution on it and expect it to work.

Yeah, well what you describe the box may as well be a "black box" embedded system at this point like the electric motor diagnostic systems my old neighbor built for the company he worked for, the company made vacuum cleaner motors. Used off the shelf systems, but added connectivity to a few different tools and had the shop's maintenance guy whip up a custom housing for it all, they'd just stick the motor in and if the sensors didn't detect anything wrong with it the screen flashed green for it or red for a bad one, the bad ones would go to an almost identical testing machine, this one however would give actual feedback data to the user to repair the motor and those employees had to receive additional training to understand what they where reading.

[Kivada]

?

My point was that there's a disadvantage to buying a Kabini as an open source user over buying the previous iteration. I'm not going to buy anything that uses radeonsi until the quality is equivalent.

You missed the point that someone defending the use of 15 year old hardware doesn't care that much about performance, thus an under performing driver would be less likely to put them off and as the EONS go on that they continue to use that hardware any improvements that the driver receives are free performance increases.

That and the prices are near the same for the kabini hardware as is for the old bobcat series stuff, but the kabini stuff is more capable for a given power envelope making it the better tradeoff to our 15 year luddite.