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Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 50: Candy downshifts out of the fast lane -- and into Psychrist's hot tub
By Thomas Scoville
[09/04/99]

How to empower a couch potato
Can ReplayTV really revolutionize television watching? Well, it can do neat stuff like rewind live broadcasts.
By Mark Gimein
[09/03/99]

Jupiter shoots for the moon
The market research firm has always said the Net would be big. Now it's big enough to launch Jupiter on a bid to go public.
By Janelle Brown
[09/02/99]

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Holey Hotmail
If the biggest free e-mail service can't keep our mail private, forget about moving all our data onto the Web.
By Scott Rosenberg
[09/01/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 49: Layoff -- Candy gets taken out with the trash
By Thomas Scoville
[09/01/99]

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There's just one problem. My new laptop needs to be Linux-compatible. I make my living covering the world of free software and I'm just not going to be satisfied with a computer that only runs Windows. I'm planning to be a dual-boot kind of guy, flipping back and forth between operating systems according to my whimsy.

But am I just asking for trouble? Laptops -- especially brand-new laptops -- are notorious for causing headaches to users of the Linux-based operating system. Laptop manufacturers delight in packing their machines with newfangled chips and gadgets whose design seems to change by the hour. Free software hackers, understandably, are often one or two steps behind those manufacturers in the struggle to write code that allows Linux to make use of such hardware.

Indeed, one of the main raps against the Linux-based operating system is its lack of support for brand-new hardware. The problem is that it's difficult for Linux hackers to gain access to the hardware specifications that they need in order to write code that will work with that hardware. This, in turn, is because many hardware manufacturers, especially those who aim at the consumer marketplace rather than at technical users, deem the Linux market too small to warrant accommodating.

It's not all doom and gloom. In some niches, vast progress has been made over the last six to 12 months. The leading makers of 3-D video chips, for example, are racing to ensure that their newest goodies work with Linux; they are increasingly aware that the avid game players who tend to buy the fastest 3-D chips are also often free software hackers.

Will the entire computer hardware industry fall into line? Or is this a case where free software may be hitting some of its limits -- consigned to always lag a little behind cutthroat hardware manufacturers constantly pushing the envelope of technological innovation? As I researched, for my own selfish reasons, the question of which new laptop might be most compatible with Linux, I found myself unable to get any definitive answers to these questions -- but I did get a close, illuminating look at the front lines of free software.

Consider, for example, the case of the much despised "winmodem."

Next page | Death to the evil winmodem!