When something improves, it's not hard to forget to say something about it. It's easy to just take it in stride and move on, leaving the poor people who worked so hard on it feeling probably just a little under-appreciated. ;)
So I wanted to say "nice work!" to the people who have been working on suspend-to-ram support and the Free software wifi drivers in the Linux kernel. Both features have been working absolutely flawlessly in every way for me for a little while now. It wasn't too long ago that I regularly ran into issues, shall we say, with both.
Even KWin's compositing comes back absolutely properly after a suspend-to-ram and the recovery time is remarkably fast and swift (well under a second). It gives me hope for some of the other things that still aren't quite up to par.
So kudos and thanks to the people working on these features. That is all. :)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
I totally agree. A few kernel releases back, it was quite difficult to get suspend working, wifi would not wake up, etc. With 2.6.25 and 26, many things got better, while 2.6.27 introduced a few regressions. They have been worked out now, I tried 2.6.29-rc3 when it came out, and for the first time ever, I can just shut the lid and everything works out of the box! And by that I don't mean that my distribution has included detection of the machine/components and installed complex scripts to get it done, but that a simple install from scratch of kernel, drivers, xorg and kde does what it should: suspend, wake up and make me happy. Rebooting? Why? :)
Thanks to all involved! And enjoy Europe, Aaron!
I believe Linus said that it (suspend) was the most difficult issue he had had to deal with because it touches every level of the OS. It's great to see that it's working so smoothly now.
And thanks to you Aaron, for providing a platform for us to express our appreciation. I've been enjoying fully functional suspend-to-ram for a couple of month, and I have to say it's really made a big wonderful difference in my commuting life at least.
It is indeed easy to take many of these things for granted.
My laptop just works flawlessly with Mandriva 10.1 and using nothing but open source drivers.
A beautiful accomplishment. I have also become adept at supporting those that support us, which is why I have generally recommended Intel chipsets for laptops. Here is to hoping that in due time, AMD's open source drivers will mature so that Nvidia will be the only company left with binary drivers.
Later and thank you from me too
I wish I could say the same. I'm running OpenSuSE 11.1 on a Dell Latitude with intel wireless and graphics, and suspend is flaky. Invariably, after a few suspend/resume cycles, something bad happens to X. I'm losing composite, X locks up or crashes, xrender starts to misbehave, etc.
Does anybody else have problems with suspend on OpenSuSE?
Just wanted to tell you and all the other KDE 4 devs that 4.2 rocks. Seriously great work. I love it!
Honestly, if we could just make linux more friendly to gamers and game developers, nobody I know would use Windows any more.
Aaron, what, exact, laptop are you using.
I just switched to KDE 4.2. I posted a comment on your blog last year on how broken 4.0 was (and though you said the complaints had been heard many times before, I still think they were too severe to have permitted a 4.0 release). I gave it a spin various times through the 4.1 cycle but it never worked very well, but I finally traced it to my xorg.conf file which I had customised long ago for nvidia+compiz and not uncustomised. Now with a nearly vanilla xorg.conf, KDE 4.2 works flawlessly, seems to have everything I expect in a desktop environment (so far) and much that is not in any other enviroment, and looks beautiful! Thanks for all the work and I'm sure this is just the start for things we users can't imagine.
I have a Dell XPS M1530 and suspend works great here.
Linux 2.6.27.
i'm using a Sony Vaio VGN-CR220E (the last few digits in that are region specific, in this case, Canada afaik). less important that the make of the laptop are the components in it; most laptops use fairly standardized hardware these days for economic reasons so unlike 5-10 years ago where i'd go looking for a specific model these days i just go looking for all-Intel guts.
I REALLY HATE THE TERM "fosser". It makes me think of "tosser" which is an unbecoming British term. Unlike most terms though, it actually kinda makes sense. (How is a pound a quid? - granted, how is a dollar a buck, but still, quid would denote 5 of something...)
Yeah FOSS has come a long way and it is only getting better.
The only thing it is lacking is cross project communication.
Bad example, but:
I think if KDE people had aproached Linus (very prominent KDE user and supporter) and asked him about his essential needs (from the recent DW interview those seem very minimal) KDE4.0 could have easily made him happy.
Sure Linus is just one highly technical user .. but in a way he also isn't. He is influencing a lot of people.
Just look at all articles/blog posts/fuss his switch has generated.
Giving people like him (or maybe just him .. at the top of my head I can't think of anyone else) that little extra care is a very wise decision marketing wise.
Just an idea for the future.
Post a Comment