[ale] Defective MoBo?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 22:17 -0500, Scott Castaline wrote:
> Sorry for using bandwidth on this, but I again asked Gigabyte if I
> could 
> just RMA the board and here is their response:
> 
> "Since Linux is open source we are unable to verify it, we suggest 
> testing with Windows based OS. It does not need to be Windows 7"
> 
> I've already informed them that I don't have Windows and really can't 
> afford to buy it just to prove or disprove that this board is bad.
> 
> Any comments? 

Right, because it is ever so much easier to "verify" an opaque binary
blob.

I seriously question the knowledge of the people behind some of these
companies.  They are making hardware, which is by definition neutral of
an operating system in particular.  Being that they are creating
hardware (or at least, creating boards that use hardware that they
supposedly have the specs for), it should be relatively easy for them to
create a driver for any operating system; particularly one that is "open
source" because there are so many people who are able to work on the
bloody thing *and* the whole API is actually available in (somewhat
readable) source code form.

For fuck's sake, it would not be *all* that hard to build a minimalistic
framework built around the Linux kernel (or for that matter, any member
of the BSD family, if they're worried about being forced to commit
indecent exposure) and provide a disk that boots up the kernel and loads
a minimalistic program that can validate that all the hardware is up and
running correctly and operating within specified parameters.  They used
to do similar things with DOS-based boot floppies and CDs, and that was
a much more difficult task.

Is there such a thing as a hardware manufacturer that knows what
supporting their product *actually* means?  I mean, seriously.  You'd
think that motherboard manufacturers were in the business of selling
illicit drugs, not selling and supporting their own hardware.

	--- Mike
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