From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: Agnelo de la Crotche <agnelo.geo@yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <3D0A421D.7EB2ABB7@yahoo.com>
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References: <3D09C883.6A525C9A@yahoo.com>, <200206141637.g5EGb4JZ011660@orthanc.ab.ca>
Subject: Re: [9fans] What a poor VGA support !
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 09:14:07 +0000
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Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

> >>>>> "Agnelo" == Agnelo de la Crotche <agnelo.geo@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> Sorry folks, but I'm in a particularly pedantic mood this morning ...
>
> > 6 DOSez : MS-DOS, PC DOS, Open DOS, DR DOS, PTS DOS, FreeDOS
>
> None of these have VGA support. They use the BIOS to write to the
> screen as if it was a 24x80 tty.
>

Whatever does the support ,  there are plenty of applications, web
browsers, disk utilities,
graphic shells running  with 16 colors and a reasonnable resolution,
while Plan9
produces only garbage with unsupported/half supported video adapters.


>
> > 6 Windozes : 95, 98 , ME, NT, 2K, XP
>
> Make that two Windows: 95 and NT. The others are just different
> releases of 95/NT.
>

That's true and not true, but  pretty irrelevant here.
If you  insist (but you do not) I can add other OS I've tested but not
installed ,
like Oberon (http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/) or MenuetOS
(http://www.menuetos.org/),
providing a GUI which has not broken any monitor yet..


>
> > 3 BSD : FreeBSD, Open BSD, Net BSD
> > 2 Linux : Debian, Suse
> > 2 Unix : SCO, Solaris
>
> As with DOS, none of these operating systems treats the VGA
> device as anything more than a cursor-addressable tty device.
> All the VGA magic is handled by a user-space application: the X
> server.
>

>
> --lyndon

That's true. But at least you can install them and configure the X
server
whenever you like (even if some newest Linux distributions like to
play Windoze and identify everything for you, including video adapter,
but usually they do it well).

At whatever level the VGA magic occures,  there are only two or
three user issues :
- stuff on screen (all OS I've mentionned)
- garbage (Plan9 - speaking for me )
- broken monitor
Do you mind taking these facts into consideration ?



agnelo