Are all of your stories ripped off from Slashdot comments?

I’d do the same if I were in Microsoft’s place, their entire existence has been to pioneer mass marketing and acceptance for the consumers and businesses, why would they let some hack company come in and use that foundation for their own benefit. It’d be the same as you designing, constructing and furnishing your home and somebody coming in and living in it having done nothing to earn their keep. Linux is a half breed that exists only for back end programmers, consumers can’t understand it enough to make it a viable competitor, they should stop trying, they can’t even overtake apple’s marketshare how do they intend on competing with microsoft.

Your mom called she wants you to stop watching x-files & clean your room.

that’s no friggin long shot… Microsoft did start with the dubious of MS-DOS…

god I’m old….

Except this foul behavior should have absolutely zero impact now, according to Matthew Garrett, we have not sent Linux as the identifier for ACPI since 2.6.24.

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/

@Joe: Actually I didn’t really read the slashdot comments on this story, in fact I rarely read any comments.

This one is “ripped off” from digg

No but really, whats the shame in that? Should I be the all seeing eye and know everything on the Internet? Isn’t the Internet was based on sharing information and data? What’s so wrong with seeing a comment on some website and build a case around it?

I don’t get all the fuss. I read the original post and frankly thought the responses back to Foxconn were childish at best. They made their case which is simply, this product/MB wasn’t sold as a Linux solution in any way.

You assume that they did this on purpose without any proof except for 100% conjecture.

I think it is simply a matter of they use canned BIOS coded as a starting point and didn’t bother to tweak/test the parts that were Linux geared. There is only some much time in the day (or money in the bank), and like they said in their response, this product wasn’t certified or in any way promoted as a Linux solution.

Bottom line, if you want to promote Linux, use a motherboard vendor that does test their products in that environment and reward them with your dollars. After all, at least they’ve tested their products on the platform you intend to run.

OOZAROO has no clue.

Linux is a singular ‘hack company’?

Did you miss the part about ACPI being an open industry standard?

“It’d be the same as you designing, constructing and furnishing your home and somebody coming in and living in it having done nothing to earn their keep.”

Horrid example that doesn’t connect with this situation. They aren’t making use of Microsoft’s code to do this, they are embracing a set of open standards. It’s what the builder of the house in your example was following when under construction.

There is no house linux is moving into, they are just building on an empty patch of soil that had a few open guidelines on how to organize things. You know, so you can get water in the house, you use standard fittings that match the public water system. If Linux wants to be ACPI supporting, they follow the standard fittings used by ACPI.

So again, your example makes absolutely no sense unless you are attempting to argue that Linux is really a form of Windows that has been hacked :\

It would be interesting to see if other motherboard manufacturers perform similar tricks… I for one won’t be buying a foxconn mobo any time soon… this kind of game is just out of order

[...] the history of third-rate hardware manufacturers, if it were not for the discovery last year of a Bill Gates email from 1999 where he complained about how Microsoft was working so hard on the ACPI standard, and Linux was [...]

anybody remember the story of windows and DR DOS?
or the leaked source code with disgruntled programmer’s comments?
this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

there is already response from foxconn
http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5458716&postcount=97

well it seems to be… just trash programming

More reasons to support CoreBoot, the GPL’d BIOS.
http://www.coreboot.org/

@joe

Blogging is a conversation. Everyone has their own take on a particular story. If you knew the details of this story then why would you take the time to visit someones privately owned domain and tell them what to put on their own site?

As you didn’t provide a personal link it leads me to assume you have possibly not an inkling of what it takes to produce quality content.

Who cares about all this Linux bullshit? The boards work with the most popular and complete OS on the market. If you want to do something like installing Linux which you ALREADY know is unstable and has many problems, you’re going to run into things like this. Why support an OS that does nothing?

What Batman? Linux/Unix runs most of the internet. It’s a hell of a lot more stable than Windows.

The email from Gates is rather intriguing to me, however, it’s Microsoft’s way of thinking. Make open source things that no one else can use for the effect of saying it’s open.

@TheBatman…

You sir are quantifiably a moron. Don’t talk about something of which you know nothing. Oh, and bend over a little further, Big Daddy MS wants to put it in a little deeper. There that’s it. You got it now.

To future commenters, if you haven’t tried any versions of Linux in the last 3 years, you do not have the qualifications necessary to have an informed opinion on this subject.

In other words, either try Linux out for yourself, or shut up.

Its understandable to have a favorite team… what doesn’t make sense is to love the very same people who screw you over every chance they get. Morons.

DON’T FEED THE TROLLS!

It’s easy to tell that the people that are bashing Linux are just trolls. Just ignore them and move along.

Dude that is pretty crazy isnt it.

JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi

This is total BS. I have production Linux (RHEL) servers with Foxconn motherboards, under constant load doing web and database work, and uptimes of 200+ days each. They’ve obviously never frozen or crashed.

@All those Linux Haters

I have been a Windows user for a long time, and have recently started using Linux.

Linux in no way is unstable, it is easy to install, use and most of all it is free.

I love Linux and think that it is ready to take on Microsoft and Apple.

Even the cool things on my newly purchased Mac were already on Linux first. Compiz Fusion being just one example.

Oh yeah, if Linux was not good why does Bill Gates have his panties in a bunch.

Proof that Linux is good enough to be a threat to a money hungry monopolistic corporation.

Please stop this insanity, foxconn responded to your friend in the last article written on the other website and they said ” the motherboard doesnt support linux “. This is not a question of standards or anything else other than the fact that the market at large wants to keep linux where it is, at the bottom. If you have been a linux user for awhile, none of this news is new, its been the same song and dance every year, new people and a new distro. If you dont like all of this, buy another motherboard.

Kyle: back under your bridge!

This doesn’t actually surprise me that much. I have a hell of a time with some boards unless I specifically add in the boot sequence ‘acpi=off’. It makes it a little difficult to promote the usability of linux to new users when the darn live CDs won’t even &*(@##$ boot without turning off those specific features that people want. Now that I learn this behavior is deliberate? That boils me more. I hope this company’s masterminds gets slaps hard by the regulators that their grandmothers feel the pain.

Kyle and others:
These boards claim to be ACPI compliant. That means as long as the OS supports it, any operating system should work. By deliberately placing landmines in their code and having their boards check periodically while running to ensure there is not a linux kernel running they are breaking that compliancy. While I am not up with american laws, I do believe that opens them to fines and even lawsuits for false claims.

Apocrypha: “Linux/Unix runs most of the internet.”

Wrong. Apache, a web server application, runs most of the Internet. Apache also runs on Windows, Solaris, OS X, FreeBSD. It isn’t often used on Windows Servers since they already have IIS available. It’s worth nothing that Apache’s lead has been steadily falling over the years.

Yonah: the point was non-Windows servers, I didn’t want to list every single kind of non-Windows server.

And a lead that is falling is still a lead.

So after all, it’s not just hearsay. Microsoft is an EVIL empire !!

Nobody gives a fuck about Linux. If you do, just buy Linux supported hardware and shut the fuck up. Good luck finding out what piece is supported though, since no Linux vendor has made a decent attempt at listing compatible hardware. Either they don’t have the cash, or they don’t have the brains.

@Yonah: “Wrong. Apache, a web server application, runs most of the *web*”

corrected that for you

And as you said that has nothing to do with Windows, Unix or Linux (the OSs that drive the internet) as Apache is a cross platform (also as you pointed out) webserver… and isn’t really anything to do with the topic – wasn’t this a discussion about Foxconn and crippled ACPI “support”?

Foxconn’s ACPI support *is* a rather striking display of incompetence, if that’s indeed what it is…

Folks, sorry to intrude on your not-so-informed conversation but I’ve been building parts of the Internet for well over 12 years and “the Internet” is more than just Apache. I’d guess that 80-90% of all SMTP services are non-Windows based (included in that 10% are all Exchange plus other Windows based sendmail, Postfix,…). The other non web (IMAP, POP3, anti-spam, NNTP, IRC,…) services out there are almost exclusively non-Windows based. That doesn’t even factor in the networking component of “the Internet” (with Cisco leading there but a fair percentage of large and small business now uses NetFilter IPTables based firewalls based on primarily Linux but also *BSD and Solaris – either knowingly (by having sensible admins) or via appliances…

As for the Foxconn situation, it sickens me on many levels. The first thing I read about it (the simple “Linux” section at the end in the ACPI tables) may have been a BIOS engineer doing his own thing not understanding the repercussions of doing so but from other things I’ve read it means that Foxconn made a Corporate decision to sabotage technology for a portion of their market and I hope the negative feedback causes headaches for at least a few VP’s over the next few weeks and makes other hardware vendors realize that open is good and standards are there for a reason…

@ rogerwilco and others:

problem is, ACPI is an OS agnostic specification and standard: an OS supports a standard, a MB and its bios support the standard, the OS and the MB meet on the standard and then work
The subject of the matter it’s not anything like “manufacturer XYZ does not support Linux, so shut up”; rather, it’s more like “manufacturer XYZ ( Foxconn here) claims ACPI support, but things eventually onky work on Vista”

now, the original thread on ubuntuforums *deduces* that Foxconn meant to actively impede the installation of non MS OS’s, but doesnt *prove* so beyond all doubts – the message exchange as quoted by the original poster on ubuntuforums just shows… that he has most probably been in talk with the wrong person inside Foxconn, one who probably didnt even know about the runtme checks and differentiated code paths in the ACPI DSDT, one who could answer repeated problem reports and accusations, with nothing else than a sort of company – brainwashed reply “it’s not our fault , foxconn does not officially support linux”

it must not be forgotten that a guy replied on that same thread saying just that – the different checks are a remnant of some development and testing procedure; more importantly, not working on another OS is a BUG that will be FIXED within the upcomiing week; the one who replied to the mails was not the right one, because ho didnt know;

now, this may prove true or not – but if it does, all those who accused will have to eat their words back

Are Linux users in some sort of cult? If a board does not support your os, then get over it and use another board. It’s not rocket science. The world is not out to get you.

Rather than complain about microsoft and foxconn all day, the rest of us just get on with our lives and our jobs. If I was running foxconn and had to deal you losers all day for a tiny bit of revenue, why on earth would I bother? You can keep your money.

[...] Foxconn has tweaked its BIOS to not run Linux without a lot of tweaking. You can read about it here or at Slashdot [...]

@sd: There is this misconception that this is about Foxconn not supporting Linux. Unfortunately this is not the case! Had it been merely some hardware vendor not supporting Linux you would have heard a million and one linux user complaining about the 100′s of vendors who don’t support us!

It more about false advertising. Foxconn advertised support for ACPI, had that been true the board should have worked.

And even that is not the problem, the problem is that Foxconn (allegedly) locked out Linux.

Now if you don’t grasp what this means, imagine the World Wide Web consortium fiddled around with the http protocol so it would cause Firefox out of all other browsers to crash…this is how sinister is.

sd,

This is not an issue of Linux support, although it has a severe impact on the likelihood of me buying the board myself. The issue is also not related to a manufacturer politely (although obviously not in this case) informing the customer that the unit does not support the OS they are using, and therefore the manufacturer will not give the issue any priority.

The issues here are that they state that the board is ACPI standards compliant (as is shown on the packaging and in the online manual, if you care to look) when it is not, and that their customer service department’s policies for handling customer complaints is extremely unprofessional.

You call Linux users a cult and choke at them about picking a board that is compatible. The problem here is that the standards notices in their documentation and on the packaging say that they are compatible when they are not, and that their answer to false advertising and mis-representation is– “so what.”

Mind that I am only taking notice of what has been claimed on an online forum, and then confirmed by the manufacturer themselves. My take on this could be wrong, but I somehow doubt it since Foxconn seems to be backpeddling on this pretty hard right now.

Maybe the issue here is not the Linux “cult.” Maybe you cannot see the problem here because you are “cultish” in your disdain for any OS other than yours.

Industry standards have to be just that, standard, and for everyone. Im worried about some of the comments here. Microsoft is kinda whats wrong with computing today. We’re being held back by their anti-competitive crap. They lock down the world to try to ensure that the only new ideas are their ideas. Anyone see a problem with that?

Im not ignoring the work or the innovation thats come from MS. They’ve done a lot of good things but they are failing the future. We need to break the ties of one platform computing. Money can and should still change hands and the world can continue to turn Im not saying it all has to be free. I dont even want MS gone I think its a decent platform but placing all the eggs in one basket is seriously foolish.

If a company makes a product for its users and mis-represents it in some way, then that is the company’s problem. It’s consumers will deal with it. The fact of the matter is, 99% of its users are satisfied with the product.

To the 1%, or in this case, 1 person that is dis-satisfied, Foxconn has acknowledged that it does not support the product with Linux. It has advised that the best course of action is to seek a refund.

There are 2 choices here. Get your refund and get on with life, or bitch and moan.

Now for fanboys to go out and claim that Foxconn is colluding with Microsoft to destroy Linux, I’ll just say this. Grow up because no one cares.

You can either choose to continue with your paranoia and flame the world that is out to get you, or you can get a life and start living in the real world with the rest of us. And yes, you can use Linux to your heart’s content in the real world, because we don’t care!

Simple avoid any products by that company.

As a person who specifies deployment of many systems for the company I work for. We will make it policy to avoid this, as we use Linux/Unix systems throughout our organizations.

Vista es worthless!!! I always strip it out of any computer I get.

sd:

Exactly. *nix fanboys need to get new and better brands of hardware. If you like foxconn so much, let me suggest a brand of equal suck, ecs or pcchips!

SD,

yet again you miss the point. This is not an OS issue. As a computer professional, I am tasked by my clients to provide them with products that are stable. The ACPI STANDARD has nothing to do with windows or Linux. it is an open standard. All of Foxconn’s data on this board says that it is ACPI compliant, and it is not. That would be like moving into a house that passes inspection on electrical only to find out that there is no grounding installed. You may find out when something does go wrong that those standards where much more important to you than you realized, regardless of what is plugged in to those outlets.

Standards don’t exist to keep Linux users happy. There is a little more reason behind all the effort involved in creating them. As a professional, I want something that conforms to these standards, whatever OS I install, and I am quite unhappy if the manufacturer makes false claims to that effect.

As a professional, I also want to know that when I call a company with a complaint about an issue regarding violation of standards which they say they certify to, the answer I get is not “so what.”

You can be certain that the indiviual who posted this complaint has returned the Foxconn board, and will most likely never buy another one. You can also be certain that, regardless of your useless bantering about how Linux users suck (which makes no useful point), there are a number of Suppliers and Builders (including the one I work for) who are waiting for answers from Foxconn, and that want a much better answer than what you are spewing.

This is not a case of “bitching and moaning” as you say. The post did me a favor by letting me know that the products on my shelves are not labeled correctly, and that the company either doesn’t know enough to be able to tell, or doesn’t care if it deceives it’s customers. My testing this morning, and the answer which I (and many others) received from Foxconn confirms that there are compliance issues with these boards, and they are now packed in boxes waiting for return. That means one board for each customer that will not receive a defective product, and possibly one customer not walking in my door to ask me why I would put that product on my shelves. I don’t consider this a case of “bitching and moaning.” I consider it a case of one person doing me a very big favor before it came back and bit me where it counts for selling these boards.

Like you said yourself, it is the consumers who deal with it. Thanks to this post, I caught a potential issue, and as a vendor (and consumer) I did, in spite of your comments. I will also say that, from the attention this article is getting, apparently someone does care. I can also thank you for trolling and giving me a good chance to take five minutes and explain to many of them who are wondering just why these standards are important, and just why this post was helpful. Thank you, again, for your help.

NoProblem,

You might want to be careful with that statement. Foxconn is not a tier three manufacturer like PcChips or Biostar. It is a tier one builder, and many name brand systems are built with their components. Dell, HP, Gateway and Apple all use their components in various models, and they manufacture under a few other brands for their components.

@Kencoe, thank you for taking the time to comment on this and helping to fill the blanks on this issue

Your comment was very concise and to the point, and gave me the energy to keep on blogging and advocating Linux and Open Source. Just the fact that somebody out there benefited from the post is reassuring to me that I am on the right track!

Once again thank you

It’s a Linux bug.

“To summarise:

* There is no code in this DSDT that could determine that the system is running any Linux kernel of 2.6.9 or later. This may even be true of earlier versions – I’m not sure when _OSI support was added
* Even if the code did manage to determine that the system was running Linux, there are no codepaths that are Linux specific. Every piece of code is run on at least one version of Windows”

http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=147

So there we go. Perhaps many eyes should be finding bugs and fewer fingers should be typing conspiracy theories.

>> It’s a Linux bug.
>> “To summarise: ….

Nothing has been proven by Matthew (from whom you get your “it’s a Linux bug” bit). He could just as easily surmise that the error is in the firmware as in the kernel. Follow the conversation there instead of just reading the main post. http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94998.html

I completely expect that the fault lies by far with Monopolysoft. Foxconn’s negligence is likely in using Monopolysoft tools and then leaving things sort of sloppily (the devs are “inexperienced”) because they know to do otherwise would really hurt their sales and treatment from Monopolysoft.

Monopolysoft’s violations lie in their misimplementation of standards (or through picking odd impl paths where the std offers more than one as correct) and then fixes for the misimplementations are done for their systems through undocumented extensions to the standard. Antitrust authorities shouldn’t continue to allow Monopolysoft to keep their code closed while competing in markets that interact with markets where they already have a monopoly. OOXML was horribly problematic on purpose. [Not to say they can't extend ODF, but OOXML leaves them "off the hook" a lot easier]

Antitrust authorities need to take a good hard look at this.

SD has not heard of antitrust laws or else is ignoring them. I hope you aren’t advocating for companies to break the law.

>> If a company makes a product for its users and mis-represents it in some way, then that is the company’s problem. It’s consumers will deal with it. The fact of the matter is, 99% of its users are satisfied with the product.

I doubt 99% of its users are satisfied with the product. I’d like to see the survey you relied on to come up with that number. I doubt most users would even know who to put the blame on.

More importantly..

You should look at antitrust laws. These laws are there to protect the consumers so that they have maximal future choice and value (beyond the immediate). Monopolists have too much power. It’s so valuable that Monopolysoft would sacrifice a great deal simply to preserve their monopolies.

If monopolies are allowed to leverage their position to create insurmountable obstacles to competitors that have better products, the consumer and those building the alternatives suffer.

Thus, the company’s fate is not simply in the hands of consumers as you claim. To try and pass that off means that you do not want the government to come in on your behalf when I and my gang of thugs raid your beautiful home and run away with the goods leaving trash behind. We’d do this over and over I think if you decided to keep the government authorities out of the picture. I think you would go crying to the authorities. That is exactly what has to be done here, too.

And provide the link to that 1% or that 99% if you get the chance. I know you made that up. Regardless, consumers probably could be helped out a bit in becoming informed about the dangers and losses resulting from CLOSED SOURCE software that are used to hide secret hooks and extensions that keep the higher valued FOSS from being a viable solution for some that require a high degree of compatibility.

>> To the 1%, or in this case, 1 person that is dis-satisfied, Foxconn has acknowledged that it does not support the product with Linux. It has advised that the best course of action is to seek a refund.

It’s funny how they now seem to be cooperating a bit more. I wonder if in fact this kind of behavior affects more than 1%. I wonder if the FTC will agree that they are labeling their products appropriately. I wonder if other government agencies might also have interesting information to discover.

I’d rather not focus on Foxconn to the extent Monopolysoft is the real culprit.

>> There are 2 choices here. Get your refund and get on with life, or bitch and moan.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that there are only two choices (snicker). I suppose then that B&M is pretty effective. It gets results.

>> Now for fanboys to go out and claim that Foxconn is colluding with Microsoft to destroy Linux, I’ll just say this. Grow up because no one cares.

Confused you are. Not on me being a fan of Linux, but about no one caring. I think you really overestimate the level of (dis)satisfaction out there with Monopolysoft products. I think a lot of people would be disappointed to learn that they are buying products from Foxconn that will tie them in to Vista and other Great(TM) Monopolysoft products.

If you have to go to the hassle to return a product, you want ALL your associates to know so that they can save themselves the time.

>> You can either choose to continue with your paranoia and flame the world that is out to get you, or you can get a life and start living in the real world with the rest of us. And yes, you can use Linux to your heart’s content in the real world, because we don’t care!

I think your view of the world is a little blurry here. This is classical talk from people that have a great hoax on consumers going and would like everyone to believe that only a few fringe “fanatics” are complaining. [The hoax depends on consumers' general lack of expertise with how software works.]

I am upset to have taken as much time as I did to reply to garbage like this comment you decided to put up. There are some good Linux distros to be made. Nowadays, many more people can create their own portable Linux distro. Firefox and free Openoffice are but the tip of what’s available… all for $0. [eg, distrowatch.com]

Well then if they decide not to support Linux, at least we know what company to avoid.
Boy there sure lot of troll here!

I’ve recently returned to Linux (Ubuntu, to be precise) after a prolonged flirtation with XP on a new laptop. (Oh, BTW, Ubuntu runs perfectly on a Toshiba Satellite A105, Model PSAA2U-04W018).

I’d buy one again.

Ultimately, bumping MSIE up to 7.0 toasted my file system. That’s when I learned that the Toshiba ‘recovery disk’ begins with an Fdisk. I installed Ubuntu.

Thanks for the discussion about Foxconn. I’ve been contemplating building a desktop for my SOHO. I’ve built several of them in the past and was planning to put together a fire-breathing machine.

I can put that brand name on the ‘don’t bother’ list.

So … how’s ASUS doing these days?

Oh, and this tidbit for the MSFT fanboys — according to my blog server logs (6 blogs off a single root, only one is even remotely technical), Linux on end-user machines accounts for nearly 10% of my traffic. I suspect that it might be higher, but some of the OS signatures have been masked … probably to get around the defensive sniffing some websites do.

It’s easy to slam Linux — just ignore the facts.

BillinDetroit, ASUS is throwing Linux on their motherboards soon. Just a bootable little thing for checking up on things I think.

And they also support the Eee PC which retails with a distro of Linux.

Probably one of the best hardware manufacturers for Linux.

[...] easy to forget with all the source compiling, the conspiracy theories, and the OS flaming going on in every corner of the Internet, that there is a fun side of our [...]

[...] easy to forget with all the source compiling, the conspiracy theories, and the OS flaming going on in every corner of the Internet, that there is a fun side of our [...]

@sd
the german people were accused of “bitching & moaning” about the inequities being imposed upon them during the 5 years of terror.

They were accused of this to :
– shut them up for fear of peer pressure.
– reduce their credibility among their peers.

you sound terribly militant in your stand against linux users.

@sd : and by “the 5 years of terror” I mean world war 2

[...] easy to forget with all the source compiling, the conspiracy theories, and the OS flaming going on in every corner of the Internet, that there is a fun side of our [...]

linux driver for foxconn