Linux Support Fades For 3Dfx Voodoo, Rage 128, VIA

An anonymous reader writes "The developers behind the Mesa 3D graphics library, which provides the default graphics driver support for most hardware on Linux (and BSD/Solaris), has ended their support for older hardware. Being removed from Mesa (and therefore versions of Linux distributions) is support for hardware like the 3Dfx Voodoo, Intel i810, ATI Rage, and S3 Savage graphics processors. Also drivers being dropped were for Matrox and VIA graphics. Mesa developers also decided it's time to end support for the BeOS operating system. Dropping this code lowered the developers' responsibility by some 100k L.O.C., so maybe we will see GL3 support and OpenCL in Linux a bit sooner."

Comments

A fork for old machines

[hendrikboom]

Sounds like it's time for a legacy fork for old machines. Or maybe just keeping old versions alive, the way Linux distros do with other libraries.

-- hendrik
 

Re:A fork for old machines

[Hatta]

That would be nice. This hardware is still common, easily available, and has life in it yet if there is software support. It doesn't take much to run Open Arena.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Aspen]

Not sure that makes sense...from the article: "Code that was mostly unmaintained and didn't receive new feature support work in years." The volunteers already quit working on it years ago: this is just being honest about it.

Want to keep using the hardware? Just keep using the 7.11 release.

Re:A fork for old machines

[hendrikboom]

Just keep using the 7.11 release.

Exactly. Now hope that Linux distros make this an installation option, perhaps after autodetecting the old hardware.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Sarten-X]

I agree, but I'd love to see someone (with time, experience, and more knowledge than I) take it a step further: A Linux distro to work on ancient machines, with the latest feasible versions of software.

When I volunteered in Africa in 2009, one of my projects was to set up a computer lab, populated with donated machines. These computers were old. The newest one was manufactured in 2003. The oldest was 1997. I ended up installing Ubuntu and Edubuntu, then stripped down the core as much as I could while still keeping things clean. The machines still take several minutes to boot fully.

What I'd love would be a distro designed for just such situations. On install, it would determine what kind of hardware you have available, and only install things that will work well. Support for really old hardware would be patched in for the distro, probably with only major bugs receiving repair attention. If a package isn't likely to run well on your system, it will alert you before installing.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Anonymous Coward]

There are distros for that. Ubuntu is not one of them. AntiX is a good option in the debian family.

Re:A fork for old machines

[realityimpaired]

OTOH, if you're still running a 3DFX VooDoo 2, you're probably not using it for gaming. It still works in VESA modes, and still works as a video card for 2D applications, it's just 3D accelerated modes that won't be supported any more. I have a server that still has an ATi Mach32 in it, and it works no problem, even though it's a much older card than the lot that's being dropped now.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Chris Mattern]

Ubuntu was a poor choice of distribution; it wants to install a default desktop and to simplify installation by making assumptions (including assuming you have a relatively modern machine). Debian would've been a better choice. You could've started with a very stripped down package selection (including passing on having an X server) without much difficulty.

Re:A fork for old machines

[tqk]

I ended up installing Ubuntu and Edubuntu, then stripped down the core as much as I could while still keeping things clean. The machines still take several minutes to boot fully.

In my experience, it's not the speed of the processor that makes an old machine feel old. It's more a combination of not enough RAM and/or slow disk. Beef those up and do a minimal install, then apt-get install everything you want. Regardless of cpu (within reason :-), it'll be more than capable of keeping up.

I just abandoned an old Sun U30 (ca. '99), not because it wasn't fast enough, but because it weighed a ton. It was perfectly capable of running Linux and OpenBSD.

As for forks for old machines, there's already Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Also consider that old machines make fine headless servers long after they're up to the challenge of serving as gaming boxes.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Culture20]

Code that was mostly unmaintained and didn't receive new feature support work in years.

Code that works doesn't need new features.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Sarten-X]

I chose Ubuntu mainly because of the Edubuntu package, and ease of installation. This was a school in rural Africa, and I was the first volunteer they'd had with a significant technology background. The nearest "computer repair technician" was a 2-hour ride away in a shared taxi, and he only knew Windows. I needed something that, if something went badly wrong, American volunteers could reinstall if needed, following a set of instructions I left. Drop in an Ubuntu disk and install, then drop in an Edubuntu disk and install. No Internet connection, and no Linux admin magic necessary.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Sarten-X]

If Lubuntu had existed as a standalone disk when I'd gone over, I'd have used that. One of the project requirements was that the system look & act as much like Windows as possible (I blame the government, but that's a rather long rant in itself that I'll only go into by request), so Xfce was out of the question. I had planned on using Kubuntu, but that didn't work for some reason (which I now forget), so I ended up running GNOME, with the panels customized to look like Windows. It sucked, but it was the best option available at the time.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Anonymous Coward]

The Voodoo 2 was exclusively for 3D acceleration and had to be used in conjunction with a separate 2D graphics card. It's only use was gaming/3D rendering so it most defiantly won't work as a video card for 2D applications.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Lanteran]

Rant please :)

Re:A fork for old machines

[Nimey]

True, but if code it depends on changes then it needs maintenance.

Re:A fork for old machines

[LordLimecat]

For REALLY old machines (2003 and prior), Puppy linux works wonders. Entire distro is under 100m, and the OS boots entirely to RAM even on a machine with under 100MB of ram.

Someone tasked me with getting a 98-2000 (i think) laptop set up and useable, so I put puppy on there and installed Opera browser (with is also wonderful for such old, crappy machines). The thing worked pretty darn good for 96MB of ram and a Pentium 2 (or whever awful processor it had). The alternative, of course-- Windows ME (what it was licensed for)-- really wasnt something I would put anyone through.

Re:A fork for old machines

[LordLimecat]

Peppermint or Puppy would also have been good choices. They aim (especially Puppy) to be a simple, but very lightweight distros. Puppy feels a little foreign because of the WM it uses, but Peppermint feels natural to this Gnome user even tho its not using Gnome. Everything feels intuitive, and very fast.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Billly Gates]

Sounds like it's time for a legacy fork for old machines. Or maybe just keeping old versions alive, the way Linux distros do with other libraries.

Or you can just run Debian Stable

Re:A fork for old machines

[nemasu]

Want to keep using the hardware? Just keep using the 7.11 release.

I hear that release comes with a free Slurpee.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Nimey]

Won't happen. Too much trouble for the distros. You'll almost certainly just have to stick with old distros or ones that are specifically for old hardware.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Reservoir Penguin]

Are you sure? I distinctly remember plugging voodoo 1 into my matrox card with a pass-through cable to play Lara Croft, but I thought they move on from this scheme in subsequent models.

Re:A fork for old machines

[amiga3D]

You know you're wrong.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Plombo]

There's no need for a fork. If anyone shows an interest in making one of the old drivers compatible with the current driver interface (there were some recent driver API changes in texture mapping) and maintain it, then it will be added back to the Mesa tree as long as it's maintained and doesn't stay broken.

Re:A fork for old machines

[DrXym]

Code that works doesn't need new features.

Code that worked a few years ago is bitrotten now when the rest of the codebase has received numerous other modifications.

Re:A fork for old machines

[grimmjeeper]

I ran a dual VooDoo 2 setup with a Matrox 2D card of some kind in my old Pentium. With my network card, sound card and a couple other things I had just about every expansion slot filled. The single video card I bought just a couple years later blew it out of the water.

As far as pulling out the support for such old cards, I don't really see that it's a problem. For both of the people still running those cards, they can spend the $10 on a brand new video card that will run circles around whatever they have now.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed. Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Plombo]

Or just use a new distro and compile and install Mesa yourself. It's not that hard.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Kjella]

The thing is, it's not one thing you have to know, it's kernel drivers, x drivers, desktop environment, applications and possibly all the ways they are configured.

Hell, 1997-2003 era computer then you might look at 32-64MB of RAM on the low end. Even loading just the latest 2.6 kernel you'll probably lose half that just to that.

At some point you have to ask, is it really going to be worth it? Can't we find them some 128-256MB machines that'll run more "normal" distros and software?

Some things tell me we'd actually get further getting a little better at shipping our outdated machines to someone who needs them. I bet there's plenty 128-512MB RAM machines in landfills all over the place.

Re:A fork for old machines

[hairyfeet]

Actually there are Win9X drivers that support up the the 7900 series on the Nvidia side and I believe the 2900 series on the ATI side so you can get a card leaps and bounds better for that theoretical machine. If it were my machine I'd go for something like an ATI 1650PRO as those offer excellent backwards compatibility with the older versions of DirectX as well as DX9 support.

As for TFA? As another person said fork it. That is what you are supposed to do right? There is still plenty of that hardware still running, hell check eBay under Voodoo and see how many of them are being sold. So fork it and keep an old version running. It is just a shame that Linus is a stubborn ass that won't allow Linux to have a stable hardware ABI like BSD, OSX, Windows, and OS/2 have, so that they could just "write once, use for years".

Re:A fork for old machines

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

The big question is why someone would want to ship such legacy hardware to Africa in the first place. The fact that there are major non-profits that do so has always baffled me.

A quick look at the UPS shipping calculator indicates it would cost upwards of $1300 just to ship a 60lb box (tower + CRT monitor + accessories) to Lagos, Nigeria, much less transport it via truck to a rural area. One could find far cheaper shipping costs than that, but it's expensive to have legitimate shipping to Africa, as things sent there have a bad record of being confiscated.

For anything within the range of those shipping costs, you could buy two modern systems from a distributor. It costs $577 to purchase a Core 2 Duo system in Lagos. That's a much better deal than dealing with often broken legacy hardware with mid/late-90s graphics cards.

http://www.eqhall.com/details.php?productID=00013

Re:A fork for old machines

[isama]

seconded, the rants are the reason for me to read slashdot!

Re:A fork for old machines

[RobbieThe1st]

Thirded!

Re:A fork for old machines

[RobbieThe1st]

However, they aren't shipping per-box. They are shipping full 40' containers worth, and it may take 6 months to get there.
It'll still be somewhat expensive... but you can cram a *lot* of computers in a shipping container. And probably get a nice tax writeoff for doing so, as well as avoiding dump costs.

Re:A fork for old machines

[93 Escort Wagon]

I hear that release comes with a free Slurpee.

Please drink responsibly - make sure an old lady doesn't slip on it.

Re:A fork for old machines

[X3J11]

GP is correct. The Voodoo3 was the first 3DFX card that supported both 2D and 3D, the prior boards required a separate 2D card. I still have an old PCI Voodoo3 2000 card or two kicking around. And a Voodoo1 or 2 somewhere that I got in a "box o' junk" that every computer nerd receives eventually.

Re:A fork for old machines

[CBravo]

The cost you mention do not represent the actual costs of shipping stuff. Shipping a container which is not in a hurry is dirt cheap.

You could have deducted that yourself. How can a new system be shipped to Lagos from (lets say) China and cost $577. And then you mention shipping computers from the US to Lagos which would be twice (or more) as expensive (without the price of the hardware).

UPS is ripping you off.

Re:A fork for old machines

[TeknoHog]

The Voodoo 2 was exclusively for 3D acceleration and had to be used in conjunction with a separate 2D graphics card.

Yes, this is how it was designed and used, but Linux does have a framebuffer driver for simple 2D output on it.

If you think about it, 2D is only a subset of 3D. Modern GPUs don't have any special hardware for 2D.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Khyber]

The Voodoo2 did not have 2D capability and required a secondary video card capable of 2D.

This was fixed with the Voodoo Banshee, which was a Voodoo2 with a 2D processor included.

Re:A fork for old machines

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

As I had pointed out, shipping to Africa is rife with corruption. Don't expect it to arrive if you're not 100% sure it's legitimate, which is something taken for granted in most of Americas/Europe/Asia shipping. UPS will ship systems legitimately at that cost, but Dell also ships their brand new computers for sale to Africa legitimately as well with an advanced, low-cost supply chain. Granted, there's still a huge shipping markup in Africa, but it's far cheaper to just buy new PCs in Africa than to ship ancient and often broken PCs there.

The tax writeoff notion is not even legal. Computers have a straight-line depreciation to scrap value after five years. If you claim the $1500 PC you bought in 1998 with said graphics cards is still worth $1500, it's not legitimate. Especially if you're a business with large numbers of old PCs, you would get busted by your third-party accountants. If you want to skip the dump costs, anything near a minor or major city will have a multi-annual computer recycling event where you can dump old junk all you want.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Burpmaster]

I hear that release comes with a free Slurpee.

That's good.

Re:A fork for old machines

[David Gerard]

define bitrotten

The X11 deprecation model: break the code so it can't possibly work, wait two years with no bug reports, remove. This is literally how a lot of rubbish no actual users cared about was removed from X.

Re:A fork for old machines

[mrmeval]

I had a Matrox card for years, it outlasted at least six motherboards and various upgrades. Now I have a board with an integrated chipset that can match all but dual head. For half of what the Matrox card cost me I bought a card with 100x the processing power, dual head, hdmi, etc etc.

Letting it die is not a bad thing it is a sad thing behind the times...

I

Re:A fork for old machines

[espiesp]

Incorrect.

The Voodoo Rush and Voodoo Banshee were both single card solutions that pre-date the Voodoo 3. I've had all three.

Re:A fork for old machines

[espiesp]

The Voodoo Rush predates both the Voodoo 2 and the Banshee card. FYI.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Dahamma]

The problem is that they are being removed because no one cares to support them any more. A fork would be 10x the effort, and 10 x 0 = 0...

Besides, you can get graphics cards with an order of magnitude more performance than those listed for $5-$20. The only reason to support them now is for a Linux 3D gaming museum...

Re:A fork for old machines

[Aighearach]

It still works in VESA modes

10+ years ago I had an ATI Rage, I usually ran in VESA modes even back then.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Aighearach]

You may not know this, but over here on linux we can run whatever versions of things we want, without even consulting the distro.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Aighearach]

Normally I run fedora, but when I was turning a 90s comp into a router a couple years ago I dropped a new-ish debian on it, and everything worked just great. It's a fake problem. The problem is choosing distros like Ubuntu when you should be choosing a more... server oriented distro for old comps.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Aighearach]

Something like debian, you get it installed and running smooth and barring hardware failure it will still be working years from now. It's all that desktop-y software that eats itself and needs a "computer repair technician."

No need for users in that setting to even have write access to things that would break stuff.

As far as re-install, you can set up a custom install disk for whatever you have installed, after you've installed it. That is pretty basic stuff. There are lots of ways to do it, and tools to help.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Antique Geekmeister]

If you pay me enough money, I will support it. Of course, for the same amount of money and integration work with other more modern software, such as FireFox and Konqueror, you could buy 100 newer, supported, and more powerful machines, or recover dozens of machines by refurbishing and recovering discarded hardwrae that _still_ has newer and supported components.

Which makes more economic and engineering sense?

Re:A fork for old machines

[Pseudonym Authority]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot

Re:A fork for old machines

[Sarten-X]

There's two ways to do business in Africa. First, there's the Western way: Employees do their job honestly, get paid very well for it, and get fired if they're corrupt. UPS probably operates like this.

Then there's the local way. What you do is fill a shipping container with equipment, then bribe an official, say, $200 on the condition that it arrives safely. Of course, attempting to bribe an official is illegal, but so is aiding theft. For a country where the average monthly wage is $40, that's a big bribe, and it gets the job done. Customs officials approve the shipment quickly (because they'll be willing to help a local, especially if they belong to the same ancient tribe), local truckers can be haggled down to shipping at reasonable rates, and the destination is miraculously free of thieves. Once the job's done, you pay off the bribe and get on with the next bit of business.

Or so I've heard, at least, from a guy who worked in shipping mining equipment.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Clsid]

I know you'll probably hate me for saying this, but I work in developing countries and it's far better to get an old pirated version of Windows 98 or XP and then be done with it. That way if kids learn about computers using those machines, they will at least have a shot in a marketplace where they will find the same pirated Windows XP if they get a chance to work with computers.

Just because using pirated software is frowned upon (and illegal in any case) in our societies doesn't mean that translates well to another society where people cannot even afford proper clothing to begin with. Unless you are willing to train a bunch of local volunteers with the innards of Linux, do them a favor and give them things they can really use afterwards to get them out of extreme poverty.

Re:A fork for old machines

[CAIMLAS]

It'll be some now (months) before the changes make it into distros. The hardware will continue to run the software it's running now. You don't have to move from Debian 6, which is already pushing the general capabilities of hardware which might have these cards, in the first place.

I mean, shit man. Do you want to play the latest 3D game on a 10-year-old 3dfx card? Where are you going to even find IDE drives that will work with such systems?

Re:A fork for old machines

[Yfrwlf]

Ah yes, one of the last major problems Linux still really needs to solve: binary portability. They should provide 7.11 available for download in a universal installation package which contains everything needed, and then at the end of the installation you select which Xorg version you want to boot into by default if you already have a version installed.

When are Linux users and devs going to hunger enough for this kind of freedom so that they all switch to truly cross-distro installation packaging systems like Zero Install?

Re:A fork for old machines

[eionmac]

Puppy Linux suits old stuff.

Re:A fork for old machines

[eionmac]

Puppy Linux I use this on macines built circa 1998.1999. Better tnan 'squeezing' a large GUI distribution like ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian etc

Re:A fork for old machines

[eionmac]

1. Always update the existing licenced Windows (XP usually) on the old machine before donating it.
2.Then dual boot with Puppy Linux. so it has a usable system if windows gets corrupted at destination with no real time anti-virus anti malware support. Do not donate unuseable equipment.
3. Attach a Pupply and Windows rescue disc to machine.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Joce640k]

.... $10 on a brand new video card that will run circles around whatever they have now.

Or just use the integrated graphics on your motherboard.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Nimey]

Get started on it then, fanboy.

Re:A fork for old machines

[tqk]

... someone finally did a hard look at it and found recent Xubuntu actually uses *more* RAM than a regular Ubuntu install!

Wow. Epic fail on Xubuntu's part. A distro advertised as a lightweight alternative isn't, yet still manages to make it out the door.

Good to hear someone's still checking premises.

Re:A fork for old machines

[grimmjeeper]

That would involve getting a new motherboard, processor and memory. If they have an older system they want to keep, the $10 video card would be the cheapest way to go.

Re:A fork for old machines

[r7]

deprecation model: break the code so it can't possibly work, wait two years with no bug reports, remove. This is literally how a lot of rubbish no actual users cared

If only... More often bug reports are removed for lack of a "more detailed explanation" or lack of a patch.

Horrible backwards compatibility is Linux' Achilles heel and the reason it has utterly failed to displace MS and Apple on the desktop.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Nimey]

Sounds like that shouldn't be too hard in theory: have a complete statically-compiled version of X in a tarball that you dump in to /opt or /usr/local [1], and have a shellscript that adjusts your paths, etc. depending on which version you want to run.

It would be space-inefficient, but hard drives are /cheap/ these days.

[1] Perhaps utilizing something like GNU Stow, even, so you don't have to faff around with paths, but only have to run a couple Stow incantations each time you change which version you want. Parenthetically, I love Stow. It's a great way to manage locally-compiled programs.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Aighearach]

What are you talking about, it's not my itch.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Khyber]

The only Rush worth a shit was the ones based with a Cirrus Logic 2D component. Those barely existed, so the Rush doesn't count.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Kremmy]

I was just given an old HP N5440 with the S3 Savage GPU. I was so happy, being able to revive it with Linux. Going to make a sweet little mobile workstation out of it... except now, what limited 3D support it has is being dropped? wahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Re:A fork for old machines

[Yfrwlf]

Interesting, never heard of that one, thanks!

Yes, it is of course slightly space-inefficient keeping older libraries around if the programs could be compiled with newer ones. If the maintainer of a program stops maintaining it, you might have to keep older libraries around if newer ones have broken their ABI/API. If the choice is between a functioning program or a broken one, I'll take the functional one and so would anyone unless you can find a replacement, and those can't always exist, especially for games for example.

I wish everything used standardized dynamic paths, like you could have them be an environmental variable, where programs would just query $LIB64 or $BIN64 etc in order to communicate effectively, allowing a system to store files anywhere it wants. Hell, you could make a structure like Windows did if you wanted to, and put all the shared libraries in \Linux, and all the bins and other stuff in \Program Files, hehe. ^^

Re:A fork for old machines

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

Yes, rant!

...And?

[Megaweapon]

This is news? Trimming out old cruft from a source code tree isn't a big deal.

Re:...And?

[3vi1]

Seriously. If your using 13-year old cards in your system, you're probably not running the latest software anyway.

And, since it's open source - you're free to keep compiling in support on your own. It's not like it's Windows where you would be SOL when a manufacturer doesn't release a driver compiled for the latest x-bit version processor.

Re:...And?

[slackbheep]

I was wondering about this as well. They mention lowering their responsibilities by 100,000 lines of code, but how resource intensive was it to actually maintain these?

Re:...And?

[jsprenkle]

I use old hardware for things like MythTV. This "old cruft" is still being used. I'd like to know why support for the old stuff is much of a burden. It should be pretty much frozen and unchanging. Seems like it should require almost no effort.

Re:...And?

[canajin56]

Not running the latest software? Doom 3 running on a Voodoo 2 ;)

Re:...And?

[Tubal-Cain]

My guess is that they plan to make some changes in the near future that will break it, and nobody cares enough to update it.

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

Or that change has already happened, and someone finally noticed and opened a ticket saying it was broken. Rather than fix it, or attempt to do so blindly since no one else still has any of that hardware, they just drop support.

Re:...And?

[hedwards]

Well, to be fair, how often does a project cut 100k Libraries of Congress out of their product.

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

Try as we might, we just can't manage to get you people to migrate to more modern hardware. Frozen and unchanging code means exactly that, the code is not being improved in any manner. We recently redid both the UI and video rendering interfaces. Say we want to further add some animation support to the video renderer for use on the OSD, that code needs to be written for each of Xshm, Xv, OpenGL, VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, and PVR-350 framebuffer output. In addition, that's primarily the work of one single guy. XvMC hasn't been supported on any useful hardware sold in the last couple years, and the PVR-350 hasn't been sold for over half a decade. So, we can either continue to support all of those modes, or we can drop the "old cruft" and maybe the people who aren't so cheap as to be unwilling to spend $20 on a video card can have something that looks a bit nicer.

Re:...And?

[hedwards]

Because if it hasn't been changed in 7 years, then chances are that nobody really knows the code. Consequently nobody is checking it nor is anybody likely to be paying attention to any breakage which might occur if they change the infrastructure and ultimately it's one more area in which a security vulnerability could pop into existence when somebody changes some other code.

Having essentially dead code in a project isn't a wise idea in most cases. But beyond that it's extra bandwidth that's not necessary for nearly everybody.

Re:...And?

[cynyr]

really how well does your "old hardware" like 480P h264 level 4.1 high profile video? I'm not really sure how you make use of a voodoo3 in a mythTV setup.

Re:...And?

[timeOday]

Seriously. If your using 13-year old cards in your system, you're probably not running the latest software anyway.

In today's networked world there unfortunately isn't much choice but to stay on the software upgrade treadmill. I could imagine using an unpatched box as an X terminal with no direct link to the internet (not even running a browser locally), but nothing more.

As for maintaining your own graphics driver, keeping up with the evolution of Xorg and OpenGL and the kernel, good luck with that. (Which is why I can't blame mesa for dropping it either).

Re:...And?

[hedwards]

It seems that way, but that is an excellent way of killing off a product. There may be a few dozen folks still using those old cards, but you can get a much newer card with a bunch off new features that will be supported for years to come for less than $10, probably including shipping.

Supporting a bunch of products which were obsolete years ago without adequate user base to ensure that the developers can properly support it can damage projects a lot more quickly than dropping support for long obsolete hardware. More than that, it's that much more code that has to be maintained and it's that much harder to implement fixes or add new features and ultimately it distracts from the hardware that people are still using.

Re:...And?

[realityimpaired]

I actually have a high-end server, built in the last year, that's using an ATi Mach32 video card. That's a 20-year old video card in a system that's less than a year old. It works great in text mode... if I *wanted* to run it in graphics mode/X I would be able to, as the card supports VESA. You don't need a dedicated driver to use VESA, as VESA is itself a standardised driver that is not being removed from Linux any time soon.

Re:...And?

[oursland]

Without the dumb effects that made that game so dark (hard to view), the Voodoo 2 makes game looks a lot more fun! Reminds me a bit of the original HalfLife.

Re:...And?

[MacTO]

I know that this case is special because it is a FLOSS project and very few of the users directly support it, but:

The developer needs to fulfil the requirements of the client. It is not the developer's place to dictate the requirements to the client.

Now I currently run modern hardware, but I've been stuck in that legacy hardware ghetto before. And it ain't pretty.

Re:...And?

[jimicus]

Say we want to further add some animation support to the video renderer for use on the OSD, that code needs to be written for each of Xshm, Xv, OpenGL, VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, and PVR-350 framebuffer output. In addition, that's primarily the work of one single guy.

And people wonder why some F/OSS projects have a slow rate of development.

Re:...And?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is news? Trimming out old cruft from a source code tree isn't a big deal.

Things have really gone downhill since CmrdTaco left.

Re:...And?

[Rob the Bold]

Not running the latest software? Doom 3 running on a Voodoo 2 ;)

Doom 3 was released 6 years ago. That hardly qualifies as "latest software".

Is Doom 4 out yet?

Re:...And?

[Rob the Bold]

My guess is that they plan to make some changes in the near future that will break it, and nobody cares enough to update it.

Indeed. Old code can be allowed to "live and let live" until such time as architecture, compiler, etc. changes make it uncompilable. Then you've either got to figure out what the hell seven-years-ago guy was doing or cut it out. And if you can live without it (mostly) then the choice is pretty clear.

Re:...And?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The developer needs to fulfil the requirements of the client. It is not the developer's place to dictate the requirements to the client.

Here's your refund.

Re:...And?

[Lanteran]

Wrong. I've got a Pentium III machine with a R128, with the latest version of gentoo installed. Which of course, as you pointed out, will mean I just compile in support, it's no big deal, but people are still running old hardware with modern distributions.

Re:...And?

[PaulMeigh]

The developer needs to fulfil as many of the requirements of the client as possible, given available time and resources. It is not the developer's place to dictate the requirements to the client.

FTFY

Re:...And?

[Plombo]

It's making it impossible to change the driver interface, for one thing. As new features are added to Mesa, the driver interface has to change. Using the same driver interface for i965 and the Gallium state tracker that's used on a 3dfx Voodoo card creates some problems due to the vast differences in how those generations of hardware work.

Since the drivers for all of that old hardware were unmaintained, they were hurting anyone who needed to change the driver interface for any reason, because it would sometimes require changing the ancient drivers for which no one has the hardware.

Re:...And?

[Lanteran]

Eh? You greatly underestimate the power of older hardware, it's not difficult for a pentium III era machine to do 480p, with a decent video card, you might even be able to squeeze it up to 720 or 1080p (with vdpau of course [on a pci graphics card]).

Re:...And?

[Beelzebud]

That's actually pretty damned cool! However, Doom 3 still doesn't count as "latest software". Still neat to see someone got a very stripped down version of the game running on a Voodoo2 though.

Re:...And?

[LordLimecat]

In today's networked world there unfortunately isn't much choice but to stay on the software upgrade treadmill/quote?
Explain to me why Win2k with Opera 10.5 would be insufficient to browse the web?

Re:...And?

[icebraining]

According to the dev on the mailing list, it was a pain to change anything.

Re:...And?

[Nutria]

If your using 13-year old cards in your system, you're probably not running the latest software anyway.

The complete wrongness of your absolutely foolish assertion is demonstrated by the fact that I run up-to-date Lubuntu on an 8 year old Sharp Actius AV18 (laptop w/ 768MB RAM and ProSavage8 video). Chrome and AbiWord are very responsive.

Re:...And?

[chill]

I just bought a brand new Matrox graphics card last month to handle 4-8 simultaneous displays.

I need to see if the support is provided by the MGA driver they are now dropping, or there is a newer driver with a different name.

Re:...And?

[Nutria]

we just can't manage to get you people to migrate to more modern hardware.

In my situation at least, that unmodern hardware:
a) works,
b) is paid for,
c) is stable, and
d) most importantly, is embedded into a laptop motherboard.

The issue is that many, many wives look askance upon buying new laptops and throwing out perfectly functioning kit just because newer s/w doesn't support it.

Re:...And?

[Nutria]

Oh, wait... 3D support.

Never mind.

Re:...And?

[DamnStupidElf]

Just as an example, I am "lucky" enough to own one of the Via Unichrome devices that's losing support. It had iffy support to begin with because Via released an old open source driver with no documentation and it was up to volunteers to keep it running as Xorg changed. Comments in the code included things like "Rewrite this so that it actually uses screens and GL contexts in the appropriate way" because the original Via programmers did things strangely. I had to write a couple horrible hacks to detect double-free corruption using magic values to keep KDE from crashing on startup. I was hoping I could learn enough to rewrite the driver properly to use it on my old laptop, but I imagine now it will just keep the hacky, mostly-working code that it has right now. Given the existence of unfixed bugs in ancient code that doesn't even use the Xorg/Mesa APIs right, it's probably the right decision to drop it.

The best part is that if anyone cares to fix it, they can just update the code and submit it back into Xorg and everything will be happy again. If I ever get stuck on a desert island with that laptop and a solar panel, I'll submit a patch when I get back.

Re:...And?

[jedidiah]

> really how well does your "old hardware" like 480P h264 level 4.1 high profile video?

My original MythTV setup 5 years ago handled it just fine actually. If not for BluRay and the HD-PVR I would still be happily using such old hardware.

Re:...And?

[kylemonger]

Explain to me why Win2k with Opera 10.5 would be insufficient to browse the web?

It would become part of a botnet within hours, that's why. Once your OS and web browser stop getting security updates, the clock starts ticking on the bad guys finding some unpatched vulnerability and your wandering into some trap they've set for you on the net.

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

Right, it's not all graphical support they are removing, only 3D support. Surely anyone actually trying to do anything 3D has already upgraded to newer hardware, or can simply stick with the old software.

It's a similar situation in MythTV. Xv is still supported for software decoding, but XvMC and PVR-350 were (extremely limiting) hardware acceleration APIs. They only work with MPEG2, and the only people who would care to use them are those still running decade old processors that sufficiently powerful for software decoding. But, you remove them to allow an expansion in the capabilities in the OSD, and all sorts of people come out of the woodwork and complain.

Re:...And?

[belg4mit]

Why is it necessarily about money? If the hardware works, why should it be scrapped prematurely?
Do these $20 video cards you speak of get fabricated at no cost to the environment and have huge
energy savings over the older "underpowered" options?

Re:...And?

[aix tom]

Be sure to submit that story then. Perhaps Hollywood will make a movie.

I can imagine it: DamnStupidElf, played by Tom Hanks with a long beard, jumping around a fire "Aha. Look what I've created. I have made Xorg PATCH!!!" ;-P

Re:...And?

[aix tom]

And the Developer has to weigh which client needs which features. If a feature is needed by 2000 clients and another feature only by 5 clients, then it makes sense to prioritize the feature needed by the 2000 clients.

Also, if one client just demands "gimme feature", and it would take 100 hours to implement, and another client says "I would like a feature, and I have prepared this pach here that works with the current development tree, and am willing to check each new version if it breaks anything" then the choice is also easy.

Re:...And?

[Blaskowicz]

I did play 720p video on ATI rage pro and ATI radeon 7000 successfully.

Re:...And?

[Nutria]

How long has PCIe 2.0 been out? 4 years?

The $30-35 fanless 8400GS and GeForce 210 cards require it, but there are still lots of 5 year old motherboards used in semi-embedded systems which can't use them

Re:...And?

[makomk]

Last I heard the MythTV developers were talking about dropping Xv and requiring OpenGL support in order to get any kind of video. Don't suppose you know if that's still planned?

Re:...And?

[jedidiah]

That presupposes that the only thing being improved in the software is fluff that requires dropping support for old hardware.

When you ignore things people want, and put in things they're not interested in, and then make their current hardware unusable you are bound to get some complaints. You also make it harder to build/buy suitably cheap and compact hardware to run this stuff.

It's one thing to ditch a perfectly good $600 Mac because you want to play more interesting content. It's another thing entirely when it's about some fluff in the OSD.

Re:...And?

[jedidiah]

It's not that simple. "Just shoving a card in it" isn't always a practical solution. The card might be larger than the entire system needs to be.

Re:...And?

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Despite how much people are bashing this decision, I completely agree with what MESA is doing and you're saying.

The cards listed are not just outdated, but ancient and byzantine. Even as a teenager, I recall it being extremely difficult to get mid-90s cards working under Windows for purely 3D gaming functions. Their chipsets followed no standards and were completely proprietary. They pre-dated both OpenGL on the desktop (GLQuake, 1997) and DirectX 6. I had to install bizarre drivers and programs, copy .dll files to game folders, and so forth to get 3D rendering working properly under such cards, even the 1999 Voodoo 3 which also followed the older non-standards. I could imagine that developing for them, particularly to modern standards, would be far worse of a nightmare.

Most graphics cards, integrated or not, shipped in the past 4 years have been built to be beefy enough to support Windows Aero (Windows Vista, 2007). Even 9-10 years ago, even the most basic graphics hardware shipped could at least do OpenGL/DirectX 8 cleanly without proprietary crapware just so they wouldn't freeze when running the 3D text screen saver in Windows XP.

And again, if you have still-functioning 14-year old hardware from the mid-90s and just have to have the pitiful 800x600 16-bit color 3D acceleration (not 2D graphics, those still will work) from that era, grab any distribution of Linux predating changes made on August 27, 2011.

Re:...And?

[Hatta]

I spent more than $20 on my Voodoo 2 setup. They're really nice cards.

Re:...And?

[RobbieThe1st]

Potentially true, but remember that most boxes are behind a NAT. Which eliminates *most*(not all, I give you that) outside attack vectors.
Seems to me that so long as your browser is up to date and doesn't let anything be drive-by downloaded... what other vectors do you have?
Of course, keeping the OS on a VM with snapshot functionality is even better, but...

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

It was discussed as a means to lighten the load on that single developer mentioned above, and determined that would be too disruptive. Just about any video card will do Xv, but OpenGL takes a bit more power. Anything nVidia 8-series will do, and probably anything 7-series, but there are a lot of users with older 6200 and embedded 6150 graphics cards that likely are insufficient. Any of the Intel Extreme, and non-HD GMA units likely wouldn't cut it either. ATI stuff should work, but their Linux graphics drivers have always been flaky.

For what it's worth, XBMC went full OpenGL several years ago, which is why we were even considering it in the first place.

Re:...And?

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Prematurely? The latest video card listed would be the 11-year old Voodoo3/4/5 cards. Most of the cards are 15 years old. All of the cards listed worked almost entirely on bizarre proprietary drivers and were built specially for the hardcore gamers of the time.

The only thing that would be dropped in a distro containing modern software is 3D acceleration support, and the cards listed couldn't even render Quake 3 from 11-12 years ago properly, if at all. Support for OpenGL 3.0, which came out in 2008, still isn't finished in Mesa because of support for crapware that.

And it's OSS, so DIY if you really want that support to continue.

Re:...And?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Now, now - be nice to Mr. Carmack.

Re:...And?

[X3J11]

Not running the latest software? Doom 3 running on a Voodoo 2 ;)

I'm calling shenanigans on that link. There's no way that game is really Doom3.

This is what a Doom 3 screenshot looks like!

Re:...And?

[TeknoHog]

I did play 720p video on ATI rage pro and ATI radeon 7000 successfully.

Sounds plausible to me. In my experience, a Pentium M or a dual core Atom can decode 720p x264 in software, and the graphics card does not really matter. There are some limitations with really old cards, though.

Re:...And?

[evilviper]

So, we can either continue to support all of those modes, or we can drop the "old cruft" and maybe the people who aren't so cheap as to be unwilling to spend $20 on a video card can have something that looks a bit nicer.

Hang on... The PVR-350 isn't a $20 video card, it's a very specialized card, which I don't believe there's a direct replacement for, anywhere. On the same token, XvMC is also the only hardware acceleration supported by many video cards which support component & SVideo output, which can be pretty important on slower hardware to support playback of HDTV broadcasts... I was using it for years, until just recently, though I admit I wouldn't have had a problem using older versions of the software.

And I had a hell of a time recently, finding an NVidia PCI-Express video card for sale that supports SVideo-output, because I don't feel like entirely throwing away the big old TV. Even if I opt to spend a $1,000+ to replace my old TV, I'll probably still keep the old one, delegated to the game-room, or some such, and want to be able to pump out a picture to it.

I was lucky to find an old, refurbished NVidia 8500 PCIe card for sale (sold-out now, good-luck everyone else...), so I'm not stuck on AGP or XvMC to drive my trusty old TV, but ironically, the bracket it came with was BLOCKING the SVideo plug entirely, requiring me to drill it out to use it, and showing just how much love there is for those of us not on the bleeding-edge of the throw-away culture. I'd think with the recession our ranks would be growing, but I sure don't see it in the Linux community, where it used to be a very strong segment.

You can find some amazing deals out there, if you look for them:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS

Linux has always made it possible to squeeze all the life out of old, cheap hardware like the above, but it seems that thread in the community is getting thinner by the day. In the case of the above, RHEL5 drivers for the intel video work vastly better than the KMS-requiring drivers in RHEL6.x / Fedora, and no, it doesn't seem to want to work with any add-in PCI 2.2 cards, but who would?

Re:...And?

[LordLimecat]

The security model of the browser and related plugins are generally more in charge of whether or not your machine gets infected, than the security of the OS itself. Once arbitrary code is running on your machine, uncontrolled, its kind of a moot point anyways. The browser is in charge of making sure that HTML and JS cant DO arbitrary things.

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

The PVR-350 is an analog tuner, hardware encoder, hardware decoder, and framebuffer. In its day, it was a great little card. It hasn't been its day in a significant number of years. The hardware decoder only allowed a very crude on screen display, and was only good for DVD quality standard definition MPEG2. Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.

You can still pick up PVR-150s, which offer an improved tuner and encoder but no output, for around $20 used. One of my frontends has a GF8400, which I bought on sale a couple years ago for $20 after rebate. It provides far better decoding, OpenGL support, and a better TV encoder than the old PVR-350. You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.

XvMC is garbage compared to modern decoding interfaces, and it was garbage when it was actually being supported by manufacturers. It only supported partial decoding of MPEG2, offering perhaps 40% better performance than CPU alone. In exchange, you're stuck with an awful black and white OSD. Any desktop system manufactured 2004 or later should have plenty of power to handle ATSC content. If you're doing DVB, then you're just out of luck, as that is likely to have some amount of MPEG4. That means you're trying to squeeze more life out of 8yr old mid-range P4s and Athlon XPs. For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation. If you leave the machine on all the time, you will recover the cost in power consumption in 2-3 years.

Linux has often been used to squeeze all the life out of old, cheap hardware like you described, but many have actually done the math to discover its simply not worth maintaining those old systems in the face of cheap new hardware.

Re:...And?

[timeOday]

Yes, but on Linux anyways, you'll have a very hard time finding any kind of modern browser packaged for a distro more than a few years old. To be fair, you can probably go back a few more years using a binary installer (no package manager), although in my experience the OS install will start to fall apart after a while if you start trying to juggle more than a couple unmanaged packages.

Re:...And?

[canajin56]

Sorry, but my winky face absolves me of all relevance issues. I'm sure you could do the same texture and mesh reduction to get Crysis 2 running, except that most engines don't have Doom 3's degree of feature fallback, so modern games would complain about the lack of shaders support, where Doom 3 rolls with it.

Re:...And?

[Bing Tsher E]

All of the cards listed worked almost entirely on bizarre proprietary drivers and were built specially for the hardcore gamers of the time.

Wrong. Completely wrong.

There are thousands and thousands of perfectly usable Dell Optiplex boxes out there with integrated ATI Rage video on embedded AGP. There is no hardware AGP connector, so if you opt out, your other choice is a plain vanilla PCI card. They are not exotic gamer-only hardware.

Re:...And?

[ToasterMonkey]

Not running the latest software? Doom 3 running on a Voodoo 2 ;)

... if someone showed me that game in the 90's and told me it was the sequel to Doom II, I'd be really let down. D3 on a voodoo 2 may still have the technical edge on software rendered Quake, but man was Quake a lot more fun.

Re:...And?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

How long has PCIe 2.0 been out? 4 years?

The $30-35 fanless 8400GS and GeForce 210 cards require it, but there are still lots of 5 year old motherboards used in semi-embedded systems which can't use them

And how many of those semi-embedded systems need to render 3D graphics? Does your industrial process control PC also run Quake? You do realize that 2D will still work...right?

Re:...And?

[jsprenkle]

You really should learn punctuation. It's hard to even understand what you're trying to say here. "you can get a much newer card with a bunch off new features that will be supported for years to come for less than $10" Sure, YOU pay for the new card, and the effort to install it. "it's that much more code that has to be maintained". If the extra code required maintenance I would agree. Why would it? The hardware is unchanged.

Re:...And?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

because I don't feel like entirely throwing away the big old TV.

Do what I did when it was time to say goodbye to my old non-HD big screen TV. I gave it away on Craigslist. A very grateful low income family picked it up the same day I posted. No guilt about trashing it. Happy new owners. Space in your house for a new TV. Everyone wins!

Re:...And?

[jsprenkle]

My cable company still sends me regular analog tv signals like they have for decades.

Re:...And?

[jsprenkle]

Sorry. Your statements are untrue and very short sighted.

"PVR-350 hasn't been sold for over half a decade"
It's available for sale on Amazon right now.

"people who aren't so cheap as to be unwilling to spend $20 on a video card"
Fine Mr. big spender. You send me the money and I'll buy something nicer.
I have something that works fine now. Why should I spend money to please you?

You said the code was "frozen and unchanging"
Therefore it's not costing anything to maintain. Then just leave it.

Re:...And?

[evilviper]

was only good for DVD quality standard definition MPEG2.

Considering that an analog TV can only handle DVD quality standard definition input, that sounds perfectly fine to me.

Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.

You're very confused. TV-output is standard resolution by necessity... The INPUT however, could be ATSC, DVB2, whatever. You still need some way to OUTPUT that to a TV, and the old cards (like the PVR-350) can do that as well as anything, and these days may have become the only option to do.

You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.

Past-tense... It's gone for the consumer, for all intents and purposes. Yet old analog TVs are out there in large, large numbers. Your only hope is to buy OLD hardware, like the PVR-350 (if that's all you can find).

It only supported partial decoding of MPEG2, offering perhaps 40% better performance than CPU alone.

It's more of a sliding scale... The worse your CPU, the better the XvMC speed-up, but you're generally correct. However, the fact that it's ONLY doubling the performance of your CPU is not to be underestimated. There's a large number of systems out there, even still being sold (refurbished) that can't play HDTV with CPU alone. I don't think the old hardware should need to be thrown away. And what's more, keeping the old hardware may be many peoples' only way of keeping their analog TV-output, so there's a pretty good rationale for it.

For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation

Yes, a modern board, processor, and video card, WITH NO TV-OUT SUPPORT, so this simple $200 upgrade has become at a $600 - $2,000 upgrade. Ouch.

with much better low power operation. If you leave the machine on all the time, you will recover the cost in power consumption in 2-3 years.

Now THAT is complete and total bullshit!

I've got a nice new system next to me... Paid plenty to get a nice low-power 45W TDP Athlon X4 (Quad-core) CPU. Got an 80+ efficient Seasonic PSU in it. Nice silent fans. A "green" hard drive that stays nice and cool. And how much power does it use sitting there idle? 65+ watts

The idle power consumption of the ancient Pentium-4 system I'm using right now? 40 watts.

Increasing bus and memory speeds has driven the power consumption of motherboard chipsets through the damn roof. I noticed this years ago with my first DDR system... With the same CPU, power supply, GPU, etc., it somehow drew 50% more power than my previous system. There was no mystery where that power was going, with a scaldingly-hot northbridge. And you know something... You can't damn-well get specs on motherboard power consumption. I know... I've tried. With each generation, power consumption is going up, even as everything else (except the motherboard) gets more efficient and lower-power.

Re:...And?

[Nutria]

And how many of those semi-embedded systems need to render 3D graphics?

Because this post refers to MythTV, XvMC and PVR-350. Semi-embedded, not using 3D graphics but more than just 2D.

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

It has not even been legal to produce the PVR-350 since early 2007. There was an FCC mandate that went into effect that banned the production of analog tuners that were not accompanied by an ATSC capable digital tuner. There was a big stink when some retailers started shipping HVR-1600s in PVR-150 boxes, before a Linux driver for the card was available. The PVR-350 and PVR-250 had ceased manufacturing several years prior to that. Sure, you can pick up the devices used, but that card has not been sold retail in well over five years.

I specifically said the opposite, that the code WAS being improved, and that time would have to be spent on those interfaces in order to maintain compatibility with the rest of the code. Rather than spend the time, they were dropped. At that point, those users who choose to continue using such hardware can remain at their current version. There is nothing wrong with that decision. The problem is that when we announce the removal of those feature, people respond on the mailing list that they depend on such features, and very quickly resort to name calling. Rarely if ever do any of those people demanding continued support ever offer to actually write that support.

So those are the three options: keep using the existing version, replace the hardware, or provide support yourself. When people decide to take a fourth option and complain, they're accomplishing nothing but drawing the ire of developers.

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.

You're very confused. TV-output is standard resolution by necessity... The INPUT however, could be ATSC, DVB2, whatever. You still need some way to OUTPUT that to a TV, and the old cards (like the PVR-350) can do that as well as anything, and these days may have become the only option to do.

You've very confused. The video output is irrelevant, its the video CONTENT that matters. The PVR-350 was only designed to handle whatever content it could record. That means standard definition MPEG2. DVDs just happened to nicely fit within those constraints, and can be played as well. That content can be decoded in software by most P3 or better hardware, so no real loss there. HD content off ATSC, and H264 content from DVB, cannot be decoded by this device at all. You can still use the X11 driver for the framebuffer output, bypassing the decoder chip, but those users with P2s and VIA systems won't be able to keep up with the CPU needs.

You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.

Past-tense... It's gone for the consumer, for all intents and purposes. Yet old analog TVs are out there in large, large numbers. Your only hope is to buy OLD hardware, like the PVR-350 (if that's all you can find).

Newegg still offers plenty of GF8400s new, although the prices are going back up now that they're no longer being produced. You can even buy older GF7300s and GF6200s, all of which are available with analog TV outputs. Even when all the retail units are sold and gone, what makes you think the resale market on PVR-350s will be any better than for these far far FAR more common graphics cards?

The worse your CPU, the better the XvMC speed-up, but you're generally correct. However, the fact that it's ONLY doubling the performance of your CPU is not to be underestimated. There's a large number of systems out there, even still being sold (refurbished) that can't play HDTV with CPU alone. I don't think the old hardware should need to be thrown away. And what's more, keeping the old hardware may be many peoples' only way of keeping their analog TV-output, so there's a pretty good rationale for it.

And those people why actually have a need for XvMC, and for whatever reason are unwilling to purchase new hardware, can simply continue using whatever version they are currently on. Nothing is forcing them to update. They can develop their own fork to maintain support for that output format. They can contract someone to maintain support for that output format. However as a non-paying, non-contributing user, they can't get onto mailing lists or message boards or forums and complain. Open source projects have no obligation to any user that is not contributing in some meaningful manner, just like how a commercial entity has no obligation to anyone who is not a paying customer.

For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation

Yes, a modern board, processor, and video card, WITH NO TV-OUT SUPPORT, so this simple $200 upgrade has become at a $600 - $2,000 upgrade. Ouch.

Newegg has a GF9500 GT with S-Video output for $55, and Amazon has VGA scan converters starting at $20. I don't know where you're looking that will charge $400-$1800, but... whew... perhaps you shouldn't buy hardware there any longer...

I've got a nice new system next to me... Paid plenty to get a nice low-power 45W TDP Athlon X4 (Quad-core) CPU. Got an 80+ efficient Seasonic PSU in it. Nice silent fans. A "green" hard drive that stays nice and cool. And how much power does it use sitting there id

Re:...And?

[evilviper]

- HD content off ATSC, and H264 content from DVB, cannot be decoded by this device at all

Doesn't matter what it can decode. MPlayer will be happy to transcode that H.264 content into MPEG-2 for you, in real-time, for playback on the PVR-350.

- Newegg still offers plenty of GF8400s new, although the prices are going back up now that they're no longer being produced.

The point was TV-out on an NV PCIe card, there's nothing special about a GF8400 specifically. That said, I did check it out, and indeed found ONE specific model with TV-Out available... unbelievably expensive for what it is, but I will withdraw my statement that it's borderline impossible to find. I did check newegg in my previous searches, so maybe just their search / categorization is / was hosed-up.

- With Cool&Quiet enabled, that CPU should be idling somewhere around 20W.

Probably much lower... I can run it fanless with the stock heatsink when idle. The motherboard software claims it's running in the single-digits, but true or not, it's clearly idling properly, and generating miniscule heat.

- Tack on another 10W for motherboard

You just refuse to listen to anyone, don't you? The chipset will reach 70C degrees in a matter of minutes without directed airflow to keep it cool. It's eating a hell of a lot of power, even when idle. Last time I upgraded motherboards I returned a couple due to the overheating northbridges, only to give up and accept that these levels of chipset power consumption are just a fact in our modern high-speed DDR world.

For the record, I'm specifically talking about an Asus M4A88T-M ... Take a look, and note the big damn heatsink on the motherboard. Take a look at some other modern motherboards and note how many put a FAN on the northbridge in lieu of a giant heatsink. I don't know what fantasy world you live in where a modern motherboard (+RAM even!) draws under 10 watts.

- That power supply is rated for '80Plus', but you're running well under 20% load, so that rating is rather meaningless.

The rating doesn't specifically apply, but I'm confident it's still nearly as efficient, and I can vouch for it being drastically more efficient than a standard PSU under these conditions.

- If you are peaking over 50W, you either have gobs of high speed memory, or a discrete graphics card.

Nope and nope. A pair of 2GB sticks that run nice and cool without airflow, so there's minimal power draw there. I see minimal increase in power consumption switching from onboard video to a discrete card, and the numbers I've quoted are with onboard video.

- The only power saving features on the desktop P4s were as a life saving measure, to prevent the chip from burning up.

I don't know WTF you're talking about. HALT / C1 power state is basic s%=&*! that's been around since the 486es. Sure, CnQ and the like can do better, but CPUs certainly never idled at their TDP (old S2K disconnect issues not withstanding), and Intel's drive to keep the P4 from burning up led them to do a pretty good job of aggressively shutting down parts of P4 cores, making the lower-end varients idle very low.

- The DDR-based systems bottomed out around 60W TDP, and only went way up from there. The chips never strayed very far from that value even when idle. The only way I could see a P4 system running at 40W is if it were a mobile system, or were manually undervolted and underclocked.

Well I guess it's a good thing you opened your mouth, and we've established just what kind of expert I'm dealing with, here...

Introducing the impossible PC, breaking the laws of physics, out of the box. For a mere $40 you too can have this magic box brought to your door: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS

Re:...And?

[jsprenkle]

Ah. My misunderstanding. but... Rather than make perfectly good hardware useless why not just leave the code and not improve it? There are still lots of obsolete cards out there. People with less money than you could use them. This strikes me as a selfish and ill thought out decision.

Re:...And?

[jsprenkle]

"Try as we might, we just can't manage to get you people to migrate to more modern hardware"

"You people"? You really ought to consider working WITH users instead of making them into the enemy

Re:...And?

[wagnerrp]

The users who are actually willing to put forth some effort and work to maintain the capabilities they want are great. I will gladly do what I can to encourage that. On the other hand, "you people" are the ones that have nothing to do with the community, other than they spring up and complain when their obsolete tech or detrimental code is being dropped for the betterment of the project. Every time we announce the removal of something, people demand that we continue to maintain it, but no one ever steps forward and offers to take ownership of it.

Re:...And?

[timeOday]

The VGA interface itself is well standardized, so you can use old cards if you just need the basic 2d capability. But unfortunately we still aren't there with 3d.

Re:...And?

[DaVince21]

This is news because the devs of a rather large important piece of software made an announcement regarding a wide range of old hardware. Seems newsworthy enough to me. Might not be to you, but it certainly piqued my interest.

Re:...And?

[DaVince21]

The code might have had to be maintained to avoid breaking them with some new releases... Who knows? They probably do.

Re:...And?

[Rexdude]

3dfx and the Voodoo cards were 4 years gone when Doom 3 came out.

Re:...And?

[iggymanz]

but who does 3D on those with linux?

sure, I have one, a GX260, it's a development server running openbsd, but I don't even need graphics let alone 3D

Nooo!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Matrox!?!

I still use this card for dual- head support on my P100.

Maybe the resources freed by the team can be used in providing support for Elite/Impact framebuffers on classic SGI Indigo?

I will consider that an exchange worth making.

Re:Nooo!

[Osgeld]

its only for 3d support, and I know damn well your p100 with a matrox card and linux is really going to miss out on all that hawt 1997 gaming action TB

Re:Nooo!

[wagnerrp]

Doesn't Matrox provide their own proprietary drivers for Parhelia cards?

Re:Nooo!

[Svenne]

Mesa never provided support for Matrox' P-series cards anyway, so nothing will change in your case.

Re:Nooo!

[jones_supa]

Pentium 100MHz...

Re:Nooo!

[RyanFenton]

Mesa never provided support for Matrox' P-series cards anyway, so nothing will change in your case.

Wait... are you trying to imitate Jar-Jar Binks?

Only 3D

[Randle_Revar]

Xorg support for these cards isn't going away anytime soon though.

Re:Only 3D

[seeker_1us]

yes, but i'm very dissapointed. I was thrilled to have 3d support on this old laptop with a r128 mobile chipset and for my old 3dfx boards on my legacy system.

Re:Only 3D

[Just Some Guy]

I understand that sentiment completely, says the guy with a bootable Alpha system sitting in his basement. But realistically, that's a 12-year-old computer. What's that running, a P3 667 or so? Probably about 512MB of RAM? Upgraded to a 30GB hard drive? Long-deceased battery? There's nothing wrong with keeping such a system around, just as long as you understand that developers can't reasonably be expected to support it at the cost of worse support for modern platforms.

Re:Only 3D

[seeker_1us]

yeah close... a p3 800-something, you guessed the ram and were close to the hard disk space (40 GB). Fully functional battery, and it does everything i need it to (which is why I can't bring myself to plunk down $300-700 for a newer netbook/laptop). I hear what you are saying (really) but it's honestly VERY nice to be able to use old hardware when it can be used, and it just seems a shame to abandon working code.

Fades

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read the headline, my first thought was Linux now supports fades on these old graphic cards :-)

Interesting

[sgt scrub]

Mesa developers also decided it's time to end support for the BeOS operating system.

One of Adam Jackson's fixes to X was "glx: unifdef BEOS_THREADS"

Doesn't affect me

[Lord Lode]

Nope, not using any machine with such graphics cards anymore.

I'm replaying some games from that era though. With wine and my modern NVidia card. These games work better in wine than Win7 can run them, if I have to believe the info about these games online.

Re:Doesn't affect me

[Greyfox]

I'm trying to set that shit up with a mac pro laptop from around 2006-2007 and it's been a miserable experience. It seems that ATI doesn't provide a driver for the X1600 card in it (fglrx and catalyst both fail) and the open source radeon driver doesn't want to recognize it either.

I've been swinging back toward Linux and the setup on the laptop went reasonably well right up until that point. I don't really need 3D on the laptop, fortunately, but it does bring back a flood of memories about endless hours spent dicking with wine and trawling forums packed with years-old information about previous distributions.

I also know that this situation is not the fault of Linux or its developers. This is one aspect of the Linux experience that doesn't seem to have improved from the first time I installed the OS back in the mid 90's. It'd be nice if they could at least bundle in an application to tell me that I'm fucked with my current video card and save me hours of trying to get it worked. Could be a pretty simple program too... "if [ "`lspci -v | grep ATI`" != "" ] ; then echo Good luck trying to get 3D working with THAT video card ; fi" would be a good start...

Older machines?

[DogDude]

I thought that one of Linux's claims to fame was that you could run it on ancient hardware? These cards aren't anywhere close to ancient, and are actively in use in who knows how many machines.

Re:Older machines?

[kyrsjo]

The cards would probably still work fine in text- and VESA-mode - but 3D graphics etc. won't.

Re:Older machines?

[diegocg]

Graphic cards have been through a big revolution. These cards may not be that old, but technologically they are ancient.

Re:Older machines?

[Tsuroerusu]

Which doesn't make much difference anyway, because the state of some of those drivers were absolutely terrible in some cases. For example, I have an old ThinkPad T23 laptop sitting around, it has a S3 Savage integrated graphics adapter. However, for several years now, X.Org has not been able to use the maximum resolution on the monitor with ANY driver AT ALL, and using the savage driver causes X to crash every 5 minutes or so. I once tried running CentOS 5 and Debian Lenny on it, both worked fine as far as I remember (Using one of those is not an option for me, as I have some USB peripherals that needs newer driver support), but anything newer takes a big dump. So I'm running with the VESA driver on this old fellow, which works fine for what I need (X.Org, Xfce, Firefox and some terminals) it to do.

Re:Older machines?

[Osgeld]

it still runs fine

heck even IF no one even heard of those companies before it would still work fine with generic drivers, this just cuts out 3d support, which as we all know is a major part of the linux desktop life, especially for pci machines

Re:Older machines?

[timeOday]

Yup, maintaining model-specific driver support for the mountain of old graphics cards out there seems to be a job nobody is up to. I just had to retire a T60 thinkpad, which is a pretty good computer, because the manufacturer orphaned the graphics card so I can't get DVI output from the docking station any more. And open source 3d drivers, frankly, I have never found worth using on any card. 3d cards have been around for quite a while now, it's a shame they still require model-specific drivers.

Re:Older machines?

[Plombo]

The idea is that if you have ancient hardware, you check out a Mesa version from git that works with your hardware. You can run old versions of Mesa just fine on newer X servers and kernels.

Re:Older machines?

[thetoadwarrior]

A voodoo 3 card is from 1999 so it's coming up to being 13 years old and it's nearly 10 years since 3dfx went tits up. I'm sure there are a few people using these cards but what sort of 3D do you really think you're going to be doing on a card that old that will require something that old and a new release of any distro?

Re:Older machines?

[DaVince21]

Rather than 3D, you could say it's specialized support for these technologies is fazed out. It's not like they won't be usable anymore, though, as has been said. They'll just use the more general methods that provide less to no specialized acceleration.

Re:Older machines?

[DogDude]

The words that you used in this post make no sense to me.

OpenCL?

[JAlexoi]

OpenCL in Linux

I do believe that support for OpenCL in Linux is in the best interest of the GPGPU manufacturers(AMD, nVidia). Because Linux based HPC systems dominate the market and Windows ain't going to unseat Linux anytime soon. Thus you might not have all the features of the 3D stack, however OpenCL is definitely something fully implemented by AMD and nVidia.

Re:OpenCL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually not, OpenCL is in the best interest of the opensource community, the developers, and AMD, but not nVidia. Why? TL:DR Karma got it on ATI.

The setting:
GPGPU is the big boom of scientific computing. Numerical methods like Discontinuous Galerkin are not only very good for compressible/incompressible flow problems, electromagnetics, and things like MHD, but they are really easy to implement on GPGPUs and take a huge performance boost (50x).

The timing:
nVidia realeased their first GPGPUs cards at the same time DG was becoming "mainstream". Although they were advertised for things like CTs (where DG is also popular), DG people got huge speed boost from CUDA (parallelizing the codes for 16.000 processors wasn't enough :D).

Investment/reward:
So you have all this people hearing about this boom on their Linux machines and Linux or Linux-like HPCs, while they use parallel visualization tools on their servers to process tons of data while visualizing them on their terminals with.... nVidia GPUs. Why? Cause ATI gives problems. But they have fixed their Linux drivers already... well noone cares anymore. Word has spread, ATI gives problems, and the $/h of a postdoc is worth more than whatever price difference it might be, if any, between an ATI and a nVidia GPU.

The Point: nVidia was there already, nVidia came with GPGPU first, and so CUDA was the obvious choice when they started playing with these things (OpenCL wasn't even there yet).

The results:
Porting from CUDA to OpenCL is not difficult, OpenCL is more powerfull, and if you ask one of the people doing these things, they will tell you that if you were to start a new project, better use OpenCL, because one day you might be on a GPU from another vendor. Ok, but when? CUDA is EASIER, FASTER on nVidia hardware, nVidia is 10 years ahead of ATI in Linux Drivers, and the HPCs with Tesla are being built now. If they upgrade in the future, are they going to go for an hybrid ATI/nVidia architecture? I dont think so. If they were to build new HPCs in the future, and if there is a significant amount of CUDA code, are they going to use ATI? Im still dealing with F77 on a day to day basis so dont think so either.

The Karma:
So you have two standards, CUDA and OpenCL, one works on nVidia cards, faster and easier than the other, but the other works on all cards. The only point people is missing is that there are no other cards. If you want to do GPGPU, you can either go with nVidia or go with nVidia. ATI won't come into the game anytime soon, at least not on linux and HPCs, and there is where everything is happening.

So nVidia invested on linux, nVidia came up with GPGPU first (at least commercially), and ATI wont come into the game in the near future... if ever. It would be good to go with OpenCL, but it is not in nVidia's best interest, because ATI gave them a monopoly for free. On the other hand, if we were to port our code, at least for the next 5 to 10 years, we would still be exclusively working with nVidia's GPGPU so why bother?

Re:OpenCL?

[ustolemyname]

I largely agree with your post as it describes the situation today, but I think it ignores the fact that Intel & AMD have OpenCL pipelines on their consumer parts now, and they seem to be hell bent on bundling those features into the server market. At which point: if all you need is some GPGPU, why would you pay anything for a graphics card?

doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[alen]

it's cheaper to just buy a new machine to use for a home server than pay for the electricity hogged up by old hardware

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Bing Tsher E]

Why would you need 3D graphics support for a home server?

Then again, why would you use an OS that required X at all for a home server? Just avoid the 'Windows Tailpipe Fume Chasing' options that insist that configuration has to be done using X11. NetBSD is a good option, for instance.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Osgeld]

yes a 300 watt PC sitting idol most of its time uses more power than a 220 watt PC sitting idol most of its time

why run a PC for a home server? you can get a single chip arm system for half the cost of a cheap PC and its going to take care of your strenuous home needs no problem while drawing what 4 watts

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Sarten-X]

My home server, built in 1999, runs at a maximum of 80W. That means it takes 2 kW (about $0.20) per day, at most. For about $500 I could build a machine that draws 20W, for a monetary savings of about $0.15 per day. In about 10 years, I could break even on what I spent on the new server, but by then, the hardware would be 10 years old again. What I have serves my purposes.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[metamatic]

Except they're dropping support for VIA Unichrome, such as the low power VIA EPIA series. My M10000 only uses 10W of power.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[O('_')O_Bush]

And 10 years from now, you'll have a machine 10 yrs old instead of 20 years old for the same price. I don't know why you think keeping that old hardware (10 yrs less reliable and less in performance for future upscaling of your needs) makes sense.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Osgeld]

but OMG that might be a 30 watt system, think of the electricity!

I run a 60 watt P3 pizza box compaq with a big ass drive, it plugs into the light socket in my closet hehe, so I have not had the privilege of sitting down and really messing with some of the bigger ARM chips. Most people make it out to be not that horrid, then again those same people might recompile their kernel just for fun so who knows

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[O('_')O_Bush]

An old card running at 50 or 80% capacity to do the same task as a new card running at 5 or 10% capacity for the same task likely would draw a lot more power.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Sarten-X]

My needs (mostly just SSH and a web server) haven't upscaled in 5 years. I doubt they will in another 5, and if I want to get something bigger then, I can. Until then, my $500 is sitting in a bank account earning interest that nearly offsets the cost of electricity itself. As for reliability, every moving part in the case (except the hard drive) is original, and in near-perfect condition. Non-moving parts don't really wear out. I don't know why you think replacing something just because it's old makes sense.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[cpghost]

it's cheaper to just buy a new machine to use for a home server than pay for the electricity hogged up by old hardware

Tell that people who run non-x86 architectures (like, say, SPARC, PowerPC, etc...) for all kinds of reasons. And before you ask why we don't just migrate to x86, remember that quality OSS software also depends on us testing it on non mainstream arches, uncovering a lot of obscure bugs that you x86-only guys won't trigger at all, but that are still there, lurking.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[LordLimecat]

Just avoid the 'Windows Tailpipe Fume Chasing' options that insist that configuration has to be done using X11.

Generally I agree with the idea that bash is better (I wince when IBM devs tell me I need to fire up the AIX GUI to run configuration; I'll take smitty, thanks); but there ARE things that are done far better through a GUI, or are much easier at 2 in the morning when you just for example want to create a new user in Active directory and you dont want to have to type out the full AD path to the OU where you want the user.

Whats that old saying about hammers and seeing everything as a nail?

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[icebraining]

Yes, but it's absurd to spend $500 on that. VIA is an expensive brand, and if a '99 drive is enough for you, why go for an SSD?

This /. thread has some great suggestions, many of them much cheaper than that.

Oh, and have you accounted for electricity price hikes? I don't know about yours, but here it climbs steadily over the years.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Sarten-X]

Yes, I missed an 'h'. Sorry about that.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[FranTaylor]

If you are willing to assume the support responsibility for your video card, then the mesa developers will not remove it from the source tree.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[slashdottedjoe]

Using a kill-a-watt or other real measurements, most PCs do not consume 300 watts unless stuffed with drives and doing Setiathome, bitcoin mining or folding@home.

I recently setup an old P3 as a skype gateway and it only uses 45 watts with a standard power supply. It runs an ATI RAGE 3D IIC. That video card is well burned in, has no fan and runs just fine. I actually have another mainboard for that system, so I can repair as needed in the future. It does the job and lets me turn off all the more modern power guzzlers when not needed.

I used to keep my workstation running all day and night to support that phone gateway. It used 115 watts. My newest PC is a quad Athlon II which consumes between 100-150 watts depending on what it is doing. So the newer hardware may not be more efficient, especially for small specific jobs. Plus, I do not have to use an otherwise powerful system to do much of nothing. I have added another task to that little skype gateway, too. It is my download machine. I download my big stuff onto its drive, so again I may turn off my other machines. That P3 is saving me money by doing all the small stuff that needs a machine to be on all the time.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[zippthorne]

I'm assuming you meant 2 kWh per day.. where do you live that that's only 20 cents? Where I live, that's *ostensibly* the price, but the real price is double that when you add all the tacked-on per- kWh fees and such (like the "fuel" fee. Why isn't that folded into the quoted price?), And that's before adding in all the "percent of bill" fees that are basically the same thing, when you think about it.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[jedidiah]

That's a claim you can't back up.

In all likelihood, the new machine will generate no less heat than the old one. In fact, the old one is probably MORE likely to be thermally efficient simply because it is old and obsolete and isn't clocked into the GHz range like a modern bit of gear.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[zippthorne]

SSH and a web server? You can do betterthan 20 W....

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[dbIII]

I'm out of touch, I thought SMIT was the AIX GUI :)
It's got no video card (I use a serial terminal with a nice model M keyboard or ssh) but maybe I should put X on my AIX machine.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[jedidiah]

That's not a complete machine. You will need to add other external (power hogging) components. So whatever power it uses doesn't make for a valid comparison.

Plus the corresponding conglomeration will likely be less maintainable than nearly any PC.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[toddestan]

Depends on what you are running. My favorite cheap servers to play around with at home are P3-based from about 500-750 Mhz or so. Those chips only draw about 15-20W, and you can get the entire system down to about 50W or so depending on what you have in it. I know an Atom draws less power, but the P3's are basically free and don't draw that much more power meaning the payback is many years.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

My home server, built in 1999, runs at a maximum of 80W. That means it takes 2 kW (about $0.20) per day, at most. For about $500 I could build a machine that draws 20W, for a monetary savings of about $0.15 per day. In about 10 years, I could break even on what I spent on the new server, but by then, the hardware would be 10 years old again. What I have serves my purposes.

Or you could head over to Craigslist, Freecycle, or the local thrift store and get a 5-7 year old machine for $0-25 and not have to put up with hardware that's 12 years old.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

2kWh costs only 18 cents where I live.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Depends on what you are running. My favorite cheap servers to play around with at home are P3-based from about 500-750 Mhz or so. Those chips only draw about 15-20W, and you can get the entire system down to about 50W or so depending on what you have in it. I know an Atom draws less power, but the P3's are basically free and don't draw that much more power meaning the payback is many years.

You may be shocked to find that a Sandy Bridge i3 on an H61 board can equal or beat the (watt) numbers you gave while completely destroying the PIII in every task. Oh, and you also get pretty damn respectable 3D acceleration too.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Sarten-X]

I don't "put up with." I just use.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[thetoadwarrior]

He loves his old voodoo 4 card with it's own power supply. Having a new machine that only uses one plug socket is something a communist would do.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[KZigurs]

False. Keeping all that extra circuits even in idle mode, not to mention the efficiency of power converters that are designed for 10x load keep the load up. IIRC modern ATI mid range card is expected to idle in 2d at around 30-50W.

Also, grandparent ignores that this only affects 3d. VESA will still work just fine.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[DaVince21]

Exactly this, until it either breaks down or no longer serves your purposes, of course.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[LordLimecat]

SMIT i think IS the gui, but theres also (IIRC) a smitty command that works from the command line (possibly thats a pun, SMIT- tty?). Its still menu driven, and drives me bananas, but it works from console.

Using a mouse on an IBM AIX machine makes me feel dirty, honestly.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[dbIII]

Ah, I see now. The slightly old version of AIX on a machine I use occasionally to do things with tapes brings that command line one up if you type "smit" from the terminal IBM3151. I turns out that I did put X on the thing once for some reason but I cannot recall why and I've never seen the X version of SMIT.
It's a weird terminal - model M keyboard that would leave a dent in a tank but the terminal portion is so flimsy that the entire case flexes out of shape and the board moves disturbingly each time you plug in a serial cable.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Bert64]

Your not all that limited, Debian/Arm has virtually all of the same packages as its x86 counterpart, and then there's gentoo...
No need to mess with cross compilers, you can run a compiler on the box itself... I do that with an OpenRD board, its not the fastest at compiling but it gets the job done and runs everything i need.

What i really want however, is something thats better designed as a small server / router, something like a dual core arm as found in ipad2 and hp touchpad etc, coupled with 2 or preferably 4 ethernet ports and 2 sata ports.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[Bert64]

You'd save even more by ditching skype and using a regular sip provider...

Then you could also ditch the 50W p3 and replace it with a 10W arm, i have such a box which runs asterisk (For sip/iax trunks and internal phones) and has crontab scripts to download large files at night (i have a limited traffic plan during the day, unlimited at night).

Outbound calls are much cheaper with various sip providers, usually far better quality, and since I'm not tied to a single provider i can pick and choose who routes my calls based on quality or price to the specific destinations i call.

Re:doesn't anyone pay for electricity?

[toddestan]

I use them for light duty Linux/FreeBSD servers. They have plenty of oomph for what I want, and the 3D acceleration isn't even a factor, and for the time being it keeps them out of the landfill. Also, as I mentioned they are free whereas the i3 is is at least $150 just for the chip and a board.

Mozilla syndrome?

[Compuser]

This does not seem like a healthy trend.

Re:Mozilla syndrome?

[wagnerrp]

Removing 3D support for cards last manufactured before Mozilla even existed is unhealthy?

Re:Mozilla syndrome?

[Compuser]

Removing unencumbered open code/GUI/interface etc. which is known to work for no good reason is unhealthy.

Re:Mozilla syndrome?

[Noitatsidem]

No, not really. It's not like with every release the code just *disapears.* If you _really_ want 3d support on those cards or whatever else may have been removed, then how about you go compile it yourself. Or maybe you can just use a linux distribution that still supports it (hint, most of them do, and will for quite a while.)

Re:Mozilla syndrome?

[Plombo]

Removing unencumbered open code/GUI/interface etc. which is known to work for no good reason is unhealthy.

No, it's not "known to work". That's the problem. No one ever tests with those drivers anymore, they break frequently, and no one fixes them. That's why they were removed. If anyone cares enough to fix and maintain them instead of just complaining on Slashdot, they will be added back to the tree.

Re:Mozilla syndrome?

[LordLimecat]

What the heck is Mozilla syndrome? What does Mozillas new software development model even have to do with a decision in Linux not to support ancient hardware?

Re:Mozilla syndrome?

[thetoadwarrior]

Those cards are ancient and if there is no one to test them then how do they support them? Are you going to provide testing for them? So you can have 3D in Linux on your ancient card in new linux distros?

need a lot more specifics

[decora]

was the problem with the new software that it used too much RAM and CPU?

or was the problem that it didnt support old hardware graphics drivers?

those are two massively different problems.

Re:need a lot more specifics

[Sarten-X]

Both. We had one machine whose video card was entirely unsupported, and had to run the bare-minimum vesa driver. It ended up being used for parts to upgrade other machines so they could boot.

famous last words of a programmer

[decora]

"Seems like it should require almost no effort."

Re:famous last words of a programmer

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Seems like it should require almost no effort."

Yeah, I've learned never to say that to my boss - at least without emphasizing some additional qualifying statements. That's the sort of thing that can bite you in the butt (especially if your boss isn't knowledgeable in your area).

Re:Ending support for BeOS? What about Haiku?

[Osgeld]

your lucky to even find drivers for Haiku, and how many 3D applications that you NEED to have running on a AGP1-2x or PCI card (which for the most part is what we are talking about here)

seriously?

Already broken

[Plombo]

Most or all of these drivers were already broken because no one cared enough to maintain them or even test them from time to time. Anyone who needs the old drivers can compile out an older version of Mesa from git and run that. Which they already had to do.

It was also said that if someone comes along who is actually interested in maintaining one of the removed drivers, that the driver would be restored to the source tree.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Already broken

[thetoadwarrior]

Anyone complaining is a tight ass and has no interest in participating in open source to provide either code or even testing for their ancient card. They just expect everyone else to bend over backwards to sort it out for them.

Awe... memories

[Anita Coney]

I remember buying my first "real" 3d card. It was an ATI Rage Fury 128. It had a whopping 32 megs of memory. And shitty ass drivers. Good times, good times...

Re:Awe... memories

[djlemma]

I got you beat. I bought a Diamond Edge 3D card for the first computer I ever assembled. It turned out to be a colossally bad idea, never realized how bad lack of drivers could be.

I don't even know how much memory the thing had, I think maybe 2MB, which was a lot at the time. And now, I feel old.

Re:Awe... memories

[ksd1337]

I think I got you beat. I've got an S3 ViRGE running in my circa-2001 HP Pavilion. And I actually use that computer for day-to-day stuff.

Re:Awe... memories

[djlemma]

I built that computer in 1995, so I think it still wins out in the old-and-crappy department. I wonder if I still have that thing lying around...

At the time I thuoght it would be cool because you were supposed to be able to hook up sega saturn controllers to it, but it didn't actually play sega saturn games. It was supposed to play special computer versions of saturn games, but the only ones they ever came out with were the ones that came with the card.

Re:Awe... memories

[ksd1337]

Well, the card was transplanted into that HP from an old '90s Gateway or CyberMax. So maybe we're even. :-)

Were the drivers separate for those Sega Saturn ports, or were they part of the graphics drivers? Perhaps an emulator can take advantage of the ports. The controller looks similar to a Genesis controller, and I'd do anything to get that experience, short of actually buying a Genesis and games.

Re:Awe... memories

[djlemma]

It has been a while, but here's my memory of how things unfolded:

1. NVidia comes to market with one of the first 3D accelerators, and Diamond puts it into this Edge3D card
2. I buy Edge3D card because it seems like the newest coolest thing
3. I play the games that came with the card and they run great..
4. New games come out, none of them support Edge3D.
5. I find out about how awesome linux is, try to install it, but no linux support. Also, no DOS support, for the older VGA/SVGA modes. So, basically, card only functions in Windows, and even then, no acceleration for most games.
6. DirectX comes out, doesn't support Edge3D, card is forgotten about, I get a different video card with my next computer.

Re:Awe... memories

[Anita Coney]

I had some sort of S3 card too, but since it couldn't really do 3d, I didn't count it as a "real" 3d card. I was really pissed because I was going back and forth between that crappy card and an original 3DFX monster add-on card. I chose the wrong one. The original monster could actually accelerate OpenGL games such as Quake.

Works as well as it did 10 years ago

[fa2k]

I'm typing this on a FreeBSD machine with an R128 graphics card and 128 MB of system RAM (waiting for my laptop to come back from repairs). It can run firefox locally, but I'm using it over networked X11 because it's a bit faster (it's running on my gateway/server machine). It is my main machine at the moment, and it's working very well. Things like xterm, gvim and irssi and ssh are perfectly fine!

Many people have the idea that computers get slower just by being old, but I think /. readers are aware that it's just the software that gets more complex. I understand that MESA would make this decision, and I hope that it was motivated by some worthwhile changes in the APIs, maybe linked with supporting new and exciting devices.

The problem with dropping support is that many organisation take away the old versions from their web or ftp sites. I experienced this recently, trying to get Python 2.6 for windows, because some software depended on it. I would have to build Python myself, but found somewhere to copy it from . If these people don't make the old version available, then years of coding effort will be lost, code which could still have benefited many people.

Re:Works as well as it did 10 years ago

[cpghost]

I'm typing this on a FreeBSD machine with an R128 graphics card and 128 MB of system RAM

Same here, but on UltraSPARC IIIi based SunBlade workstations running X on a R128 under Solaris 10, Debian Linux/SPARC 6.0.1a, FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE, and OpenBSD 4.9. It's the only card I was able to find with embedded FCode (needed by the SUN firmware) that runs perfectly on this architecture. It's a shame to see MESA guys so trigger happy dropping support for chips that are still running perfectly, albeit somewhat slowly.

Re:Works as well as it did 10 years ago

[pheer]

The problem with dropping support is that many organisation take away the old versions from their web or ftp sites. I experienced this recently, trying to get Python 2.6 for windows, because some software depended on it.

Here you go, just not linked from the downloads page: http://python.org/ftp/python/

Re:Works as well as it did 10 years ago

[fa2k]

Here you go, just not linked from the downloads page: http://python.org/ftp/python/

Thanks! I'll see if I can get that application going (PyROOT) when I get my laptop back :)

Re:You guys

[Lanteran]

Ridiculous. A computer from '06 can and will run any distribution released today.

Re:true cost of coal fired power

[instagib]

If you argue in ecological terms, don't forget the impact of new hardware: get raw materials out of earth - ship them to production - produce parts - ship parts to assembly - ship machine to customer. This offsets the ecological "break even point" quite some time, in favor of using old hardware longer.

Good.

[jimicus]

I've thought for some time that the "you can run it on ancient hardware that Windows doesn't support" is a terrible argument in favour of Linux (and F/OSS in general) for a couple of reasons:

1. Software that needs to care about the hardware (such as the Linux kernel or the Mesa library) is not exempt from this being a fast-moving industry, and updating drivers is not without cost in terms of effort. Effort that could be better spent elsewhere.
2. I think it hurts credibility to say "Support for more hardware than Windows!" (But most of the supported hardware is at least five years old, some of it's twenty years old! If you want to use a chipset that's been out less than a few months, expect pain!).

Re:Good.

[iggymanz]

huge gain in credibility when that "more hardware than Windows" includes ARM processors, UltraSparc, IBM S/390 and System/z mainframes, Mac PPC and intel, and quite a few others. Some manufacturers put out the hot new chipsets (within certain product lines, at least) with Linux drivers too. A couple minutes research before you buy works wonders

How is Doom 3 "latest software"?

[Sycraft-fu]

It was released in 2004, 7 years ago. If that's the most recent thing you can show running (never mind the really nasty hacks necessary to make it run) well that just furthers his point: You aren't running modern software.

Why dump the i810 so early?

[damn_registrars]

The i810 was used in systems and cards much more recently than the 3dfx cards mentioned, for that matter 3dfx ceased to exist prior to many of the cards and systems that came out with i810 chips.

Re:Why dump the i810 so early?

[kwoff]

Well, personally I still hesitate when I see products beginning with 'i' because of integrated graphics cards like the i810.

Re:Why dump the i810 so early?

[KZigurs]

i810 did the job okay, i815 was pretty much up there with BX at the time.

Re:Why dump the i810 so early?

[Nimey]

Probably 'cause the 810's 3D capabilities were shit. Intel didn't have any non-shit 3D ability on their IGPs until at least the 865, at least for Compiz's purposes.

Remember these old chips' 3D acceleration is what's no longer supported; 2D is still functional.

3dfx

[Errtu76]

Ah the good old days. Sticking in the 3dfx voodoo card (and later a second one, attached to eachother) and running Moto Racer. Awesome!

But yeah, most on-board videocards nowadays are already better than that, so i can understand the move. Thanks though, for supporting it :)

Re:Linux Unmaintainable?

[seeker_1us]

RTFA. This is about MESA, not Linux.

there's a much cheaper VIA option

[Blaskowicz]

asrock PV530 is a cpu+motherboard sold at 50 euros, making it the single less expensive way to build a dekstop PC or server from new parts. it's at 1.8GHz and needs an added gigabit card, so eats more power but you can finely set up frequency and voltage, even overclock it. It has been running nice as a NAS, DHCP, tftp, ssh etc. though with a lot of overhead from using ntfs-3g (haven't got the money to shift the storage to ext4 or something yet).

and the graphics support sucks

[Blaskowicz]

the second paragraph I forgot to write : its integrated graphics is ill supported. there are proprietary drivers, but only for ubuntu and suse. not debian! open source drivers are outdated and don't work, unless you find out you can build the SVN version and get a working 2D only one.

it's a very recent VX900 chipset, launched a year ago, less well supported than some 10-year-old cards (forget about the built-in h264 decoding, too!). I do use a very light desktop (startx and lxde-core) on the server for slow web browsing with firefox 6.

it's a pity that I can't run counterstrike 1.5 or quake 2.

funnily, the MESA announcement seems to include that chipset too.

Re:And there goes half my stockpile.

[Hatta]

Find a collector to take them off your hands. There are guys at VOGONS or vintage-computer.com who would probably give you money for them.

Re:You guys

[RobbieThe1st]

Yea. I've got some P4's that work perfectly well with modern Linux, and with LXDE it can feel *very* snappy.
I'm not sure I'd run KDE with compositing unless I had a *good* graphics card, but...

This.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

A developer talented enough to sustain modern 3D acceleration standards for 15-year old proprietary hardware could do much more for the FLOSS community.

Re:You guys

[X3J11]

Modern Slackware is still a reasonable choice for older hardware all the way down to Pentium Pros. It may require a bit more effort to maintain than any of the *buntus, but generally when something breaks on a Slackware machine, it's your fault and not a maintainer's.

SliTaz is another good one

[jefe289]

I have a '99 laptop (K6-2 processor, no less) running SliTaz-- it boots in seconds, and does some lightweight tasks really well.

Again, this.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Precisely.

If you want to keep current with a browser like Firefox without having to compile your own version, you have to have a system with SSE2 instructions. That means a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64, not an ancient late-90s system. Usability for modern web browsing also requires heavy amounts of running javascript with modern DOM/CSS standards, which even P4/A64's can have significant struggles doing. Running Flash 10.X also requires a hefty system, and most P4/A64's barely meet the minimum system requirements.

And Win2K (abandonware since July 2010) still only supports IE6 as its system's browser. Unless you spend a lot of time to customize it to root out any access to the IE6 Trident engine and security model under Win2K, your systems are vulnerable to the same crap US-CERT pointed out in 2004. And Windows XP will be in the same unpatched, abandonware boat as Win2K in little over 2.5 years (April 2014).

Blame it on Windows, but would you really install an exploitable Debian 2.X / or even 3.0 from the same time line in the Linux world? And if you don't care about usability on the web, care about security, and have rock-bottom systems, have people use Lynx. Good luck with that.

Re:You guys

[Lanteran]

Well '06 can include Core 2 processors, and for a computer bought then, dual core 64-bit would be the norm. But yeah, I've got P4s hearkening back to '03 that still run xfce just fine. LXDE works wonders on stuff older than that.

Re:You guys

[evilviper]

You're exactly right. Even tuned for the best speed, RHEL6.x with KDE4 drags a P4 down to frustratingly-slow speeds. RHEL5.x on the same P4 is super-snappy.

Re:And there goes half my stockpile.

[Hatta]

They just sell them for scrap. Wouldn't you rather they go to a good home?

Not just Linux...

[Barbarian]

While 3dfx clung to a crippled OpenGL interface in favor of GLIDE, MesaGL on windows could run Quake 3 with graphical acceptability on twin voodoo2 cards, whereas 3dfx's driver that they refused to update would have ugly white boxes everywhere there was partial transparency used.

Re:You guys

[tqk]

Modern Slackware is still a reasonable choice for older hardware all the way down to Pentium Pros.

Agreed, as was it's little step-brother Zenwalk the last time I looked. SW was the second distro I used (soon after SLS imploded). Debian (et al) pees me off big time from time to time and I'm often tempted to go back to SW. So far, Debian's great admin tools have kept me from jumping, though I loved SW's netpkg last time I saw it.

Interesting that the biggest FUD against NVIDIA's

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that the biggest FUD against NVIDIA's proprietary drivers is that they would drop support for older boards and leave end users without support.

NVIDIA now supports older legacy boards than the open source equivalents, and updates them on a regular basis for newer kernels and X ABIs. (certainly there's no new features added, but they are being maintained)

End of BeOS support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Hopefully there won't be an impact on Haiku...

Linux now supports "Fades" on older hardware

[mschoolbus]

I wonder what other cool features they will implement for the VooDoo!

I still use my Rage 128.

[OrangeTide]

I still do some OpenGL development against my Powermac B&W with ATI Rage 128. My 3D programs are so basic that it doesn't tax this old hardware, unless I did something wrong. It's a good sanity check for when I did do something wrong.

Not a big deal though, I haven't upgraded Debian on it in a couple years. And I dual-boot Mac OS X 10.3 on it (but I might switch to 10.4)

"Linux" forces you to upgrade your hardware

[Geofs]

My laptop is a 9 years old Mitac Celeron M, 1.2Ghz with i810 graphics. It works perfectly and I don't need nor plan to buy a new one. Over the years, I saw Linux support becoming better and better for this all-Intel laptop. However, since 2008, things become more and more difficult. Features like KMS are hard to get working. Newer X drivers don't work anymore, requiring manual tuning to Xorg.conf to use "i810" instead of "intel". It means that installing a new Linux distro almost always requires text mode/kernel options. Although my laptop is nearly entierely made of Intel components, hardware support never reached 100% and will obviously never be. Sensors drivers, for example, were never written. I even tried to write them myself.

Ten years ago, as many others around the world, I advocated "Linux" saying it was lighter than Windows and did work on older hardware. I attended many LUG meetings, install parties and other kinds of events. I was installing Linux on 486s with Pentium Overdrives we donated to people who could not afford a computer. I was saying to everybody that Windows was evil. It was evil because "Microsoft had secret agreements with hardware vendors" so they would bloat windows and stop old hardware support to force people to buy a new computer.

Today, it's the same for Linux. Hardware vendors "contribute" to Linux (the kernel, X drivers and so on). In fact, they control Linux totally and don't have any plan to make it compatible with older hardware.

Now, I'll be forced to either stick with old software (and old bugs and old security issues) or go buy a new laptop.

Forms of hardware support

[DrYak]

There are still some things to say in favour of Linux :

- Support shutdown: the removal of older drivers is mainly due to the lack of support for these drivers. Absolutely no one is maintaining them anymore. They have not been patched for year, they are just accumulating cruft, their older architecture is just standing in the way and blocking progress for more/better acceleration.
Had someone showed up to reprise the maintenance of this drivers, perhaps they wouldn't be cut of. But currently, nobody in the community is volunteering to maintain them.
The situation is rather different from companies with proprietary drivers which could have the resources to maintain an older fork.but don't do it, because they want the users to move to newer hardware.

- The good thing with Linux and open source in general, is the availability of choice. Okay, perhaps that these drivers won't be available in the latest Mesa/Gallium3D version. But. Older mesa and Xorg driver didn't suddenly stop existing. Just like KDE 3.x was still around for some time while KDE 4.x matured. You can bet that, on some of the popular distro, you'll see community efforts to offer alternative repositories with the older i810 drivers still available except older Mesa to start showing up in Ubuntu's PPA or SuSE's extra repositories.
- Probably, while Ubuntu, Fedora and the like will move forward to the latest drivers, but it's very likely that distros which specialise into older hardware will be less eager to move to the newer version. Just like DamnSmall Linux continued using 2.4 kernel long after 2.6 was out.
- And all things said, the older version will probably still be available for DIY distros like Gentoo. Allowing you to mix and match version of software to handle unsupported drivers.