From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Apr 8 7:37:18 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1F2B437B424 for ; Sun, 8 Apr 2001 07:37:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 58871 invoked by uid 100); 8 Apr 2001 14:37:15 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15056.30619.213558.966987@guru.mired.org> Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 09:37:15 -0500 To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: BSDi Acquired by Embedded Computing Firm Wind River In-Reply-To: <114947099@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Ted Mittelstaedt types: > So, what happens when someone with a e-machines system with a winmodem, > a bunch of usb peripherals, a crappy monitor and video card goes and > tries to load FreeBSD? Well, their chances of success are lower than if > they tried loading, say, Windows ME. This is because ME has to be designed > to run on that absolute junk hardware - because that's the target market > Microsoft is shooting for. I would change the emphasis on that last bit. ME wasn't designed to run on absolute junk hardware. It was designed to run the Win9X drivers that the vendor of that absolute junk hardware wrote. The end result is the same - it runs on absolute junk hardware. The difference is that MS doesn't pay the price for making absolute junk hardware work, the hardware vendors do. If every absolute junk hardware vendor wrote FreeBSD drivers for their hardware, it would make FreeBSD much more usable on the desktop. It would also take much longer to make major changes to the driver API. I think MS finally got rid of DOS mode driver support in WinME - meaning it took 5 years. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message