On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 07:04:01PM -0400, Corey Osgood wrote:
Robinson Tryon wrote:
Would writing to Intel (if only to be counted as one more data point) help at all?
No.
I thought that Intel had a pretty good track record with the FOSS community, what with their wireless cards and integrated graphics cards having nice, open drivers... but perhaps it was all about the money and they didn't actually care about maintaining a relationship with the community at all...
Intel is a big company, by choice or accident the attitude towards open source software is not the same everywhere.
Intel's datasheets are available freely online. I don't know if there's more info that they send to Award, etc, but the i440bx, i810, and now i830 ports were all written from those.
These are all pretty old chipsets. Public data sheets for the newer ones have significantly less useful information.
The fact that Intel also have their own boot software EFI may also be a reason why they don't throw data sheets at us, but that is pure speculation.
It's the embedded controllers, which may/may not be Intel's design, that are the biggest discouragement for most people considering laptop ports.
Very true. Noone usually knows how the black box works and it's often involved in everything that differs between a laptop and a desktop; ie. all the reasons the user bought the laptop like power management, integrated special keys etc.
//Peter