When I bought it, I got a driver CD as well as warnings for Windows Vista. I hadn’t checked for Ubuntu compatibility, so I did expect some troubles and braced myself for hours and hours of fiddling with JACK to make it work. So I started with installing Ardour and trying if I could get anything recorded there. Nothing.

Then I remembered my system was sporting the flexible PulseAudio. So, I went to volume control, saw the Audiolink listed under input devices. After I had selected it, I opened the GNOME Sound Recorder, pressed record and started to play. Bingo! Everything just worked. No fiddling needed. All you have to do is to select a different input, using the default volume control.

This really demonstrates the power and user-friendliness  of PulseAudio. I know that with JACK it is possible to do quite a lot with input sources, but that is too much for what I want. I just need something simple and this is working great for me! Thank you PulseAudio developers!

Lately I got more and more the feeling that hardware vendors are more and more extending their support for Linux.

However, it’s still far from perfect and not all companies have muche experience with interacting with the Linux community. Some companies still seem to be hestitant to be kind to Linux-users.

If we could show them that their products really are used by Linux-users and what products cause the most problems, it could encourage them to improve the Linux support.

What I suggested at Brainstorm is to start, in cooperation with other distributions, hardware vendors and maybe upstream projects, a survey to collect data about the hardware that is used the most frequently and what hardware causes the most problems.

Some other great news(at least for me) is that I’ve (or actually the kernel developers) got my new motherboard working. Like I said in Back to old motherboard, I was back to my old Asus M2NPV-VM. However, since I knew that there had been at least one HDD driver update in the kernel since 2.6.24-16, which is shipped on the 8.04 LiveCDs, I promised myself to try again after the two weeks in Limburg. The last update to 2.6.24-20 just arrived before I got home and the changelog looked large, so I had some hope. And yes, it did work after I swapped the motherboard! So now I’m a bit faster with a bit better sound quality and a lot better graphics! Now all I need to do is close the bugs I reported about problems with the motherboard and test the graphics!

-Motherboard: Asus M3N78-EH
-Graphics card: Asus EN9600GT HTDI
-PSU: Spire Jewel 420W

It all started when wanted a better graphics card than the onboard Geforce 6150. I just bought the Asus EN9600GT for my old Asus M2NPV-VM. But it ended wrong, like I described here:Asus Asus EN9600GT + Asus M2NPV-VM = no signal.

But I ordered it again, but now with a motherboard capable of PCIe 2.0 and a better PSU that has the PCIe plug, so I won’t have to sacrifice two IDE power plugs. A plus I discovered later was that the new PSU is much more silent than my old Q-Tec Dual Fan Gold 400W.

But after I connected all placed all cards in the slots and all cables in their ports, which went a lot better than my previous motherbord where the 9600GT blocked one of the IDE ports, I discovered that there was some kind of problem. First I thought it was the same as I had with my old motherboard, but updating the BIOS, nor disabling APIC solved it. It just wouldn’t boot.

What’s happening is that it can’t discover the SATA harddisk good. It does find it, but something times out, it checks again, times out again, until I end up into a BusyBox. Somehow it just can’t find/mount the harddisk. But it can read the initrd file, which is very strange.
I wanted to test the computer and installed hardy on an old IDE harddisk, but after that I discovered that the onboard ethernet connection doesn’t work. I can connect the cable and nm-applet does try to connect, but DHCOFFER times out. The spare PCI ethernet card I tried didn’t connect the cable at all, so that one’s probably broken. So I’ve got no internet, and no data, since my computer is the only computer in the house that supports SATA. I tried to boot Windows, which was installed on the IDE harddisk before I installed Ubuntu on it, but it doesn’t work. Windows refuses to boot when you change the motherboard and you’re required to reinstall it.

I’ve reported two bugs describing my problems, but I have no idea of how to download the updates when everything is solved, because the Live CD and the version it provides don’t work. This are the reports:

bug #231162
bug #231159

This is the reason that you probably haven’t seen me for a while now. This computer doesn’t contain my data nor has an IRC client installed. And I have to share it with my sister and mother. On top of that it runs WIndows XP and thanks to SP3 the nVidia drivers don’t work anymore, so the screen rendering is very slow.

I hope to be back as soons as possible, but maybe the only way to do that is to put my old motherboard back! And that would be a waste, so I’m refusing to do that.

(A question: my graphics card has some kind of thing at the top that looks like the thing that you put into the slot when inserting a PCI(e) card. I can’t describe it better, I hope you understand it. I’m just curious.)

But after I plugged it into my motherboard(an Asus M2NPV-VM) and connected all the cables, which costed me 1(of 2) PCI slot(blocked by the fan), two power connectors for disk-drives/IDE harddisks(goodbye and one blocked IDE input I was ready to try it. But when I connected my monitor it told me that it didn’t get a signal. Whatever I tried, no matter how good I looked into the BIOS(where I couldn’t find any option that made it work), it still didn’t give any signal. So I had to bring it back. Fortunately I got my money back, but now I don’t have this new card!

I think it was caused by this: the card I bought uses PCI Express 2.0, but my motherboard has one PCIe x16 slot, and supports just PCI Express 1. Officially PCIe 2.0 should be backwards compatible, but there are a lot of reports of several cases where it didn’t work.

I’ve posted this message to warn you and to ask you for help. I still want to buy a new graphics card, but I’m afraid that in order to get the 9600GT working I need to buy a new motherboard. But when I do that I’ll have to save again before I can get new RAM. Do you think that I forgot something? Is there a magical hidden switch in the BIOS? Did you have the same problem? Do you want to say something comforting to me? (:P)

Thank you in advance for possible answers.

(I’ve posted the same post at Ubuntuforums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4903056)

Update: I’ve found out that, although ‘they’ say that PCIe(short for PCI Express) 2.0 should be backwards compatible with PCIe 1.0 and 1.1, it almost never works with 1.0 and not mostly, but not always, with 1.1.
I’ve already reordered the card but now with a new motherboard(http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=1&model=2102&l1=3&l2=149&l3=650&l4=0) and a new power supply(http://www.spirecoolers.com/main/product_detail.asp?ProdID=614) so I can keep my second DVD player. But the motherboard just contains one IDE socket, so I have to dump my second harddisk or one DVD player. I’m still doubting which too choose.

But, this is not (always) true. Windows itself isn’t very good at supporting hardware, it’s even not very flexible. For example, when you move your harddisk containing the Windows installation to another setup it won’t work, or give at least a lot of trouble. The reason why so many things work is that all hardware manufacturers write their own drivers, because without support for the most poplar operating system they’ll go bankrupt, because way too few people will buy their products.
When a new hardware component is found in Ubuntu it will work or you’ll see jockey(Hardware Drivers) pop up, which will ask you to install restricted drivers. Unfortunately there are some products that don’t work with Linux, but that’s mostly because they’re very obscure or closed. It’s very hard to support all devices available, Microsoft can’t do that too.

I’m using temporally a RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI for networking. It gave some problems in earlier versions of Ubuntu(read: before 2.6.24), but now I’ve got hardy installed it worked right after I booted. All I had to do is to select the right network.
However, on Windows it didn’t work. I had to download the drivers from the Internet(which I couldn’t do, I needed to get the RaLink working first before I could look the drivers up at the internet) or install them using a diskette or CD. I couldn’t use a diskette, since RaLink doesn’t provide diskettes, but I also couldn’t find the CD. You could say that it’s my fault and that to get things working in Ubuntu you sometimes also need to download the drivers, but a fact is that things work more often out of the box in Linux than in Windows when they’re not closed. And it’s not the only thing that required more action to work. At another computer that’s running Windows there are problems with the front USB hub. Windows keeps asking for drivers to install and they don’t work for all things.

And you’ve got the screen recognisition. Before X 7.3 things were better in Windows. But now I think you can say that X has beaten Windows. I’m using temporaly a new screen with a different ratio and lower resolution and when I boot Ubuntu for the first time the resolution was adapted. Unfortunately the maxmimum resolution wasn’t detected properly(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/180601) so the resolution is set to 1024×768 everytime I boot, whereas the monitor can handle up to 1400×1050. But I can solve that easily by changing the resoltution in nVidia’s configuration utility.
When I booted in Windows the screen resolution was lower than I had set it, since my other screen can handle higher resolutions, but still in the other ratio and my screen had black space at its side, which I didn’t have with Linux.
And there is more. When you connect an USB stick to the computer that hasn’t been connected to it before Windows needs to do all the hardware driver checking again, which happens everytime it finds a new piece of hardware. This takes some time.
However, when you connect that same USB stick to Linux it just mounts normally.

And there are other things, but that’s more a lucky coincidence. For example the way Linux handles digital cameras. When you want to import photos from your camera on Windows you’ll probably have to install the huge suites provided by the manufacturer. But on GNOME you have the slim program GPhoto, which can be used to import from any camera. There are also other ways to import photos on Windows, but they don’t work very easy or out of the box. So at the end you’ll have more free space and an easier way to get your photos to your harddisk, exactly the way you want them to be and the same way for all cameras.

The conclusion? I think that the only reason that Windows has better hardware support is that the hardware producers are begging to be included in Windows. All of them write their own drivers for Windows, a lot less also for Linux. But when the hardware is actually supported by Linux, which is improving a lot, it works better and faster than on Windows.

Doordat de kast die ik wilde kwam de computer in eerste instantie 1,5 week later dan ik eerder had aangekondigd, maar omdat de kast heel moeilijk leverbaar bleek(het was niet eens zeker of hij wel zo komen) kreeg ik van Pim’s PC Shop (waar ik besteld had) een mailtje of ik een misschien een andere kast wilde kiezen. Dat heb ik gedaan, en voor de Asus TA-210 heb ik nu de TaceNS Audeo in de plaats.

Hij kwam uiteindelijk op donderdag 11 januari, meer dan een maand na de bestel datum, 4 december 2006). Zoals ik twee stukken eerder zei, wilde ik Kubuntu installeren.
Dit is het systeem:
Moederbord: Asus Moederbord M2NPV-VM (Socket AM2, nVidia GeForce 6150 + nForce 430)
CPU: AMD CPU Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz, 1000 MHz, Boxed
Werkgeheugen: Kingston ValueRam 512 MB, PC5300, 667 MHz, KVR667D2E5/512 (2x)
HD: Maxtor Diamondmax 17 160 GB SATA-II
DVD1: Samsung DVD-RW SH-S182D
DVD2: Asus DVD-E616
Voeding: Q-Tec Dual Fan Gold 400W
Kast: TaceNS Audeo

Toen ik Kubuntu wilde installeren, stuite ik op een probleem; de computer bevroor telkens. Ik heb op ubuntuforums.org om hulp gevraagd en op aanraden van iemand daar met de Boot Options noapic en nolapic. Dat werkte niet. Ik dacht eerst dat het iets met SATA te maken had, want voordat ik noapic en nolapic toevoegde aan de Boot Options en splash en quite erbij weghield het opstarten stopte bij ‘ata2: ….’. Na heel veel proberen en denken dacht ik dat het misschien wel eens aan de OnBoard videokaart kon liggen. Daar zijn wel vaker problemen mee in combinatie met X. Ik heb toen geprobeerd  Kubuntu te installeren met de alternate CD(in de text mode). Dat lukte! Ik dacht dat ik eerst nog een workarround moest zoeken voor de video, maar dat hoefde niet. Ik heb nu de officiele nVidia 8xxx driver geïnstalleerd en het werkt nog steeds.
Ik ben nu druk bezig met het inrichten van mijn computer, wat weer iets lastiger is nu ik amd64 draai. Zo heeft de officiele flash-speler geen 64bit versie en de google toolbar ook niet. De computer is nu veeeel sneller, de meeste programma’s lopen direct als je ze opent. Dat mag ook wel, want mijn computer is Vista Premium Ready, en dat vraagt nogal veel.

Ik wacht nu tot Lupine de nvidia-kernel die bij nvidia-glx 97xx hoort online zet, dan kan ik Beryl ook installeren. Tegen die tijd post ik wel een aantal screenshots.