Ok, now that I've got your attention, I'll make this brief.


When you are helping anyone with a Laptop problem relating to sound, powermanagement, or ACPI (which is probably causing the sound and power management problems). Please do not immediately tell them to patch and recompile their kernel!

Some kernels (Suse... Slackware? others?) come with Acpi patched and already enabled. Turning on or installing and turning on the acpi deamon will fix these problems.

I am not trying to be grouchy or anything I only wish to point this out as I find many, many questions here answered with recompiling as the first solution. Please, suggest trying acpid before recompiling, just to save time for the lucky ones.

Thank you very much.

its always good to point things out, IMHO its not so good to label a thread very very important please read.

I had a reported post on this one, several actually, which is a first, but here in Hardware there is very little need for a Moderator, its not often flame wars get started over which realtek module was better. Normally when I run accross thread titles like this, I would just close it. Its Troll bait, plain and simple.

However, here's my problem... I also agree with Caeda, after we get to compiling kernels and get past the dozen or so pitfalls with that, it becomes the quicky solution to anything hardware. For a newbie, you're forgetting the 14-15 pitfalls they're going to have to learn in order to do what you suggest. I went through one thread where a newbie was led to recompile (and try to recompile RH's butchered source??!?!), in order to get emu10k1 to work. Meanwhile, the newer revs of the emu10k1 source are available at SF and will compile against any kernel back to... 2.4.12 (probably).

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,
Can you change the title of the thread? I usually just ignore threads with this kind of title, but I saw that you were the one to post to it last, so figured I'd check it out.

The main problem with general hardware help is that not everybody has the most up to date information about how to get it to work, and people tend to assume that the latest stable kernel contains all the fixes to all hardware problems. I think it's mostly just something that's "cultural", and as such can be modified to be more helpful. . .
OTH, I almost always recompile my kernel after a fresh install. I throw out the bug works-around for hardware I don't have, I modularize most things, and I add support that I need. I don't think it's a bad thing to learn to recompile the kernel, but it is a bad thing to expect that to fix all problems. . .

Nah, I can't change thread titles, Jeremy reserves the right to do that, and I never bother him about it unless there's a euphimism for human copulation in the title or something on that order. The man is quite busy I suspect.

The thing that drives me batty is Redhat and their up2date utility. Its an awesome tool, but keep that thing away from my kernel and my bootloader!

Too often I have to help a newbie compile some odds and ends module like orinoco_cs or the broadcom 4400 driver or the 3com 2000 module and a simple explanation turns into a major headache because their running kernel and their source tree are all out of whack. Then there's Mandrake's bizarre need to put the extension "custom" on the kernel source header which makes some badly built module packages go bo-yo-oing because the source tree doesn't match the running's name.

I guess the important thing I wish people would do more often before replying would be to read the kernel Changelogs. When I saw that the entire PDC lines up to 20276 and the whole Highpoint line to 376 were finally in the kernel with 2.4.21-pre3, I started jumping up and down.

This is making me think...

(five minutes later, after making coffee.)

Recently I did the forum thread about important things to include when asking a questions, now I'm wondering if maybe I should start a discussion thread about important things to keep in mind when replying to one. An open thread and a sticky... hmm...

Tell me what you think.

Cheers,

Finegan

No point in bothering him, I was mostly curious.

Most things RH bother me when it comes to system administration. Most things GUI bother me when it comes to system administration. =-}

I think it would be a good idea. I know I've responded to some requests for help in what turned out to be a less than helpful manner, though it made perfect sense to me. It would be most helpful if some people who are relatively new would relate what kind of responses were the most helpful, just as it would be useful for the "gurus" to relate what kind of questions are the easiest to *want* to answer. There are many questions that I could answer but don't really feel I have the time to take baby steps with the person asking the question. I know many times it just the way the question was asked, but it's still much more interesting to help someone who has demonstrated some initiative in finding the answer themselves. . .
Anyway, I'm probably starting to sound like a troll, so I should stop. =-}

Yes, a "common mistakes" spot would be great! Maybe clear up having a pile of little messes and make em into one big mess

sort of a LQO creed... no one is more helpfull than i. i am a member of LQO. as a member of LQO i understand that i am a member of a great and selfless group of linux users with a history of helping each other. for as long as i decide to be a member(and wander outside of the general forum) i will take seriously the responsibilty of helping newcomers with their questions just as others have helped me. there is no such thing as a stupid question, only misinformed windows users.

Or, as a certain teaching character in South Park once put it:
"There are no stupid questions - only stupid people."

Seriously, although I am very much in favour of this idea, just look at how many people actually read the rules of these forums. And, of course, it wouldn't be too long before someone cried "censorship".