On Monday 09 May 2005 11:54, Erle Pereira wrote:

Acers Laptop Ad in Times of India (today: 9th May '05), page 15.the "fine print"

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"the Linux that is loaded is a free version and would have limited functionality until another operating system is installed"

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this is really stupid!... can anything be done to educate the acer guys? this doesn't make any sense. It is extremely misleading. What "Missing / defunct " functionality are they talking about?

Should be refering to the graphics, Wlan and internal modem. Incase of graphics, 3d acceleration and mpeg decoding are in the closed drivers. They are usually freely downloadable. Also the latest Xorg progs have drivers for most nvdia cards. Intel has opened the specs and drivers for their wlan chipset.

Ads like these are _extremely misleading, damaging and do more to confuse people about GNU / FSF than anything else. more M$ fud ?

Mostly the stupid hardware companies still cant figure out the frying pan and the fire. They will tap dance until burnt to a crispy while M$ sucks out the last cent. Good for the blokes who are selling hardware with GNU/Linux. Even IBM touts it's desktop with winxp. Reason it's not commercially viable (read actually say something useful when a user calls) for them to support new linux users on GNU/Linux. Most problems on a GNU destop is due to newbie ignorance. The corporate and bussiness user is a different ball game altogether.

rgds jtd