Nathan J. Williams wrote:

> Oh, we're trying. But code is really a pretty poor substitute for
> documentation. Personally, I've been working on an audio driver for
> the iBook, and trying to turn off the screen backlight; there is code
> to do this in both Darwin and Linux, but it doesn't "just work" when
> ported.
> 

I don't want to give the impression I don't appreciate the effort 
and quality of NetBSD and the package system: it's quite an 
accomplishment. But at the same time, I do get frustrated with 
"works for me" replies or comments that sound more zealous than 
informed.

I am going to have to switch to linuxPPC to see if I can 
accomplish what I need to, and that doesn't make me too happy. I 
loathe RPM-based distributions and that's all I seem to find for 
PPC hardware. I can't ask for more help than I have gotten from a 
volunteer effort -- that would be ungrateful and rude.

On that note, how can the supported hardware database information 
be improved? What I would like to see would be a screen dump of 
all the information from a stock piece of every piece of supported 
hardware: all the open firmware information, all the dmesg probe 
results, just as a reference. Would that be useful to anyone? I 
think the benefits would the ability to compare what a new user 
sees in his hardware vs some standard, and thereby see any 
anomalies (for instance, my video problem: what does dmesg on a 
working 9x00 look like? what does OF say about the card?).

This might have saved some time on this, and perhaps on my scanner 
questions as well. Admittedly, I have the first Open Firmware 
hardware Apple made, so some quirks are to be expected: it would 
nice to know what they are.

My US$.02.



-- 
Paul Beard
8040 27th Ave NE
Seattle WA 98115
206 529 8400

"You can't make a program without broken egos."