[GRLUG] Knoppix with mouse problems?

[Michael Mol]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 11:17 AM, John J Foerch <jjfoerch at earthlink.net> wrote:
> People have commented in this thread that perhaps linux has abandoned
> compatibility for some old machines.  I highly doubt that.  Linux is
> renowned for its excellent support of ancient hardware--and renowned
> for people porting it to all kinds of crazy devices.

I beg to differ...There are many, many drivers and subsystems that the
kernel team have dropped support for over the years.  Typically, this
happens when some component of the kernel API changes and there's no
longer an active maintainer for the device.  See the old DevFS and
NTFS drivers, old ISA or MCA device drivers, and sound cards that were
supported under OSS but never had their drivers ported or recreated
for ALSA.  Those are just the examples that I can think of off the top
of my head.

I suppose it's entirely possible that the driver for the chipset in
question simply broke without anyone really noticing.

Bob, can you paste the results of lspci and dmesg for a 2.4-series
kernel and a 2.6 series kernel?  Also, while I don't know exactly what
changed in 2.6.9, I do remember that there was a major architectural
shift in that version that caused a lot of drivers and support
software to require upgrading; ISTR it being a key point in the
discussion around the kernel devs' switching away from an
even-stable/odd-development release cycle.  Can you find a distro
release that uses a kernel between 2.6.1 and 2.6.8?

> It wouldn't be linux that abandoned your hardware, but perhaps the
> compile settings used by the distros you have tried.  Perhaps you should try
> compiling your own 2.6 kernel for this machine.

That's another possibility, of course. :-)

-- 
:wq