Linux Lack of Support for Core Hardware

Crossposted to my own journal:


The year is 2004 and it's still next to impossible to get X11 configured and running on popular modern Intel hardware.

I installed Windows XP and Fedora on my Dell Dimension Desktop. My Dell Dimension Desktop has a Intel 865G graphics card. The Intel graphics card was the number one selling graphics card for the year last year (like it or not). One would think there's linux support for it? Right? Wrong.

Nothing in the base install.

So I go to intel.com and they have drivers. But they are precompiled drivers for Redhat8.0 and Debian. Nothing for fedora.

So I modprobed around to get the i830 driver to load and the agpgart driver. But even "X -configure" failed.

Ugh! This gets old. Real old. I've been dealing with base Linux brokeness for way too long.

So everytime I read another one of those "This year is the year Linux breaks into the desktop space" I just ask myself, "What year is it again?"

Update: After doing more research on this I found you actually have to downgrade your BIOS to get to 1024x768. That just sucks.