Hardware that Works with Linux

It’s sometimes surprisingly difficult to find out whether hardware will work with Linux. Partly, this is because a piece of hardware often consists internally of chips manufactured by someone other than the hardware itself, and it’s the chips which you must have drivers for. For instance, I have a Leadtek TV tuner card (PCI) and the chips onboard it are a couple of Connexant chips plus a Philips (tuner) chip. This is one of the few products I have seen which actually lists the chips on the box, however. Finding out what chips a product uses can be difficult in itself. Often the easiest way (for PCI cards) is to plug the card in and use “lspci” or equivalent to find out what’s on it, but by that stage you’ve already laid down your cash for the product.

Even knowing the chips and knowing that there is a linux driver for them doesn’t always tell you how well your device will be supported. The aforementioned TV tuner card required that I add a subsystem ID to the driver and recompile the kernel. Once I’d done that, it worked fine (well, it received digital TV fine; I never tried analog. I also got the remote to work fairly easily).

I bought a new (external) ADSL/2/2+ modem recently, an “OpenNetworks iConnectAccess621″. It has a single ethernet port as well as a USB port. I wondered if I would be able to talk to the modem via the USB port and thereby free up two ethernet ports – one on the PC and one on the modem. As it turned out, the iConnectAccess621 use a Texas Instruments (TI) chip, and I could talk to it using the “RNDIS” driver in Linux (RNDIS apparently is a badly-documented Microsoft-developed protocol for ethernet-over-USB); however, restarting the computer seemed to lock up the connection (couldn’t talk to the modem anymore) until I also power-cycled the modem. I partly blame the modem and partly blame Linux’s USB implementation (which seemed to have a lot of trouble dealing with the resulting situation on the USB bus; kept on giving error messages and took ages to boot).

The Alternative Mac?

Recently I wrote a post about Apple’s EULA for various of their software products requiring that the software only be installed and run on Apple-manufactured hardware. Just recently, a company called Psystar Corporation (yeah, I don’t know how to pronounce it either) made an interesting announcement: they are producing Mac-compatible PCs which can run OS X. Not only that, but they’re willing to sell you OS X Leopard pre-installed on the machines.

I wonder what Apple’s response to this will be. Apple are fairly litigous and I will think they will probably try for an injunction if they think they have any chance of succeeding. Of course, they might decide they don’t. I’ve already said that I think the terms of the EULA are anti-competitive and should be illegal; now, we might find out what the courts think (or at least, whether Apple believes its own terms are enforcable. If it doesn’t, that certainly leads to the question of why they inclue these terms in the first place…).

Edit 17/04/08: You might want to be careful before you give this company any money. See what OSNews says.

ATI driver woes

There are no less than 3 choices for a driver when you have an ATI graphics card, it seems. This would be a good thing if any of them actually worked.

I have an X1250 (which is integrated into a 690G-chipset motherboard). The “radeonhd” driver works but doesn’t support TV-out, XVideo acceleration or 3D acceleration and so is really little better than the vesa driver at this stage. The “radeon” (or just “ati”) driver gives me a blank screen (I filed a bug report). The proprietary Catalyst driver (or “fglrx”) works except it is a pain to install (on my homebrew system), all OpenGL programs crash (looks like the opengl library provided with the driver is causing some sort of memory corruption or double-free?), and Xvideo output from MythTV results in a double-image (one on top of the other, as if there’s some sort of de-interlacing issue). Of course XVideo didn’t work at all until I set some option “TexturedVideo” in my xorg.conf file – the only hint I got to do that was the X sever logs; the option wasn’t documented anywhere. In fact, none of the options for the fglrx driver are documented officially.

I’ll also throw in a complaint at this stage about the “/etc/ati/amdpcsdb” file, and the fact that settings it contains silently override equivalent settigns in xorg.conf, so that you end up wondering why changing the xorg.conf file doesn’t appear to have any effect.

Back to the original story. Basically, three drivers just means I’m screwed three ways. I’m trying to build a Home Theatre PC and my only option for watching TV, at this point, is now to install the MythTV frontend on another machine (with integrated Intel video) and watch it on that.

Edit 14/04/2008: I got the double-image problem sorted – it was actually MythTV itself that was causing the issue, the standard de-interlacing filter converts the image into a double-height image with the fields one above the other and this is what I was seeing. It’s meant to then double the frame rate and show the two halves one at a time but for some reason that wasn’t happening. I’m partly to blame here because I’m using a subversion pull of MythTV rather than a released version.

Also, I’m pleased to report there’s been some progress with the open-source ATI drivers. The radeonhd driver made another release (1.2.0) which apparently does nifty stuff like 2D acceleration (still no TV-out, 3D, or Xvideo). Also, by using the latest drm module (latest pre-patch kernel release, 2.6.25-rc9) and switching to the EXA acceleration method I was able to get XVideo working with the radeon driver, which is pretty good, though it still can’t do TV-out, still blanks the screen if anything is connected to the composite output when I start X, and it now also leaves me with a blank screen when I exit X or switch to another VT. Never-the-less it’s great to see some progress on these drivers.