[conspire] July 11th CABAL meeting cancelled

[Rick Moen]

Deirdre and I are going to be in Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday,
July 11th, so there will be no CABAL meeting that day.


A few words to sum up the 'I bought this computer and have problems
getting driver support for its video|wireless|ethernet on my distro'
problem, because people keep coming here with it.

(But yes, no criticism whatsoever intended of Ken or the several
generous people who stepped forward to answer the question he asked,
which wasn't how to support his existing ATI chip but what video card to
get.)

o  Brand-new is risky.  Brand-new and bottom-dollar, more so.
(You can rely on whatever Fry's is pushing to be both.)

o  Getting help requires accurate chipset identity information.
Look closely at any alleged chipset information from, especially, HP or
Dell, because they lean towards marketing names rather than real ones.
How do you tell the difference?  Well, um, just look at these:

  ATI Vision
   vs.
  AMD Radeon HD7560D

Isn't it pretty obvious?

o  When in doubt, running 'lspci' from a live CD distro is pretty
definitive about what your chipsets _really_ are.

o  Don't forget, if distro release n doesn't support a brand-new
chipset, such that you need to retrofit some proprietary-driver as
fallback, odds are that release n+1 will have open-source support
out of the box.