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nForce MCP Network Driver Working On FreeBSD 5.1
Dan writes "Quinton Dolan is in the final stages of porting the NVidia Linux nForce MCP network driver to FreeBSD-5.1. He is looking for users/developers with access to this hardware for testing help. The driver currently appears to be stable on his hardware (an MSI K7N420 Pro), although he hasn't done much stress testing, nor does he have access to an nForce2 based motherboard to test."
It's been 20 minutes since this was posted and nobody's replied. I suppose you could say that nobody cares and therefore infer that *BSD is dying. :)
Never let your emotions get mixed up with something as silly as a computer
operating system. It isn't healthy. So BSD fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on.
Hope this helps.
From his post:
If you are interested in testing this, email me offline.
Oh, okay. How do you want me to do that? Use smoke signals over TCP/IP?
I've never used *BSD, but all the propoganda I've read says that it has a built in Linux emulator. Wouldn't that make it easy to port?
Also, why bother using a card that requires some special driver? Every run of the mill Ethernet card that I've thrown in a box works just fine without any tweaking or downloading special drivers.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
I have an NForce2 based motherboard. As far as I know, the NFarce is a proprietary chipset. Under Linux 2.6, I can get the sound working, but that's it. I got myself an ATi card for accelerated graphics using a free software driver, and put a Intel eepro100 type network card for networking.
I would love to take out the network card personally, but as far as I know there is no free driver for it. Is this person working on porting the closed-source driver?
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Narrr! I was hoping the '*BSD is dying' posts were dying.
So, if I port a dying driver to a dying OS, do I get a story about me too? Sheesh!
I'm sorry were we suppose to immediatly fill the board with SCO/Microsoft bashing and general off-topic discussion to make this BSD threads look like the Linux ones?
:)
No thanks. We're busy doing real work.
and the knowledge based society ...
Which means you take steps to prevent sharing of information and knowledge whenever you can. I would caution against trying to reverse engineer this equipment since it is now against the law (DMCA). If developing garage door opener equipment that is interoperable is viewed as a violation of the DMCA then this certainly would be.
Better yet is to simply not ever use Nvidia hardware: it places your whole business/organization at legal risk becasue you never know who might try using it with Linux or BSD.
i dont think you really want MCP on your computer
do you?
Joy!peffpwpc
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
flask of ripe urine
pressed to bsd lips
bsd drink up
I've a soltek frn2 board, I've been trying to get the net port on the board to work with Suse linux trying to ftp install it, a bit hard when the driver has to be downloaded and installed seperately! I've been doing a bit of investigation of the hardware and one of the strings that came up was 'xerox' I can't remember how I got it (I sort of gave up and bought a card) If I can reproduce it I'll post the string etc