substitute

My old server, which is actually a Gateway desktop machine from 1997, has an old SCSI card in it. It's an Advansys. The Linux driver for this card hasn't been updated in forever. There are apparently problems with the driver, although I have had none.

Therefore when I configure my kernel build, I have to check a box marked "Use broken things" or I can't check the box for my SCSI driver.

Lately, the "use broken things" box has disappeared. On investigation I find out that the kernel tree ships with that configuration unavailable. I have to edit init/KConfig and add in a description for the "broken things" option, and then the box becomes available.

I understand that I should probably just get a new SCSI card, or actually a newer computer, but this is annoying. Do the kernel maintainers not trust the people building the kernel to know when to check the "Broken" box? If I'm building a kernel then I can always fuck myself by leaving out my filesystem or my network card, it's not like I can't destroy everything anyway.

Grr.

I'm sitting at D's right now and there's a tech guy here installing things. A 37" flatscreen LG monitor is up on the wall with the root@localhost prompt. There are driver messages all over the screen. He looks sad. It's like a trip back to 1996, when everything was done by hand. Apparently the mode lines aren't quite right.

Soon this will be one of those scrolling news/sports/ads/bullshit things on the wall; the others have them mostly already. It's not nearly as bad as a TV, though.

Linux kernel 2.6.10 on Redhat Fedora core release 3 (Heidelberg). ATI driver. Ça ne marche pas. I wish him luck.