Seems to have been a long week. Geeky point of note was the supposed leak of some of the Windows 2000 source code. Quite a coherent discussion of this is at NewsForge. We all said Windows should go open-source …
Also found myself playing with the 2.6-series Linux kernel after messing up my installed copy of the nVidia drivers through trying to modify support for the Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo, so decided to give the bleeding edge a go … Not totally unsuccessfully, it must be said – although a number of revisions of the kernel build were needed to, in order:
- Add audio support for onboard VIA chipset;
- Add SCSI disk support for emulated storage, via USB mass storage (for USB flash drives etc.), and
- etc.
Am now running an apparently stable build of 2.6.0 with much better graphical support, thanks to discovering that my nVidia display drivers were ludicrously out-of-date. Have downloaded 2.6.2 which I now realise I probably should have tried in the first place.
Oh, and the sound seems to lag about half a second behind the action with Unreal Tournament anyway … so it was probably all completely pointless.
Let’s hope the proclaimed “pre-emptive kernel” stuff helps the system run better generally.
might be better off with the 2.4 series for a while. After all the 2.6 is realy optimised for servers rather than laptops.
having said that 2.6.2 might be much better..
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Interesting you say that, actually, Martin. I’ve heard that view and exactly the opposite from various sources. 🙂 Many are saying that it makes a huge difference on the desktop. The pre-emptive stuff is supposed to make a desktop system run better under heavy load, although I don’t know whether that was the original motivation for writing it or not …
For what it’s worth, my process of upgrading to kernel 2.6 (2.6.2 now actually) has shown noticeable benefits, but that may be due in part to the fact that I upgraded the nVidia drivers at the same time!
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