playing fair

I’ve finally come to the end of the line with my adventure into motherboards with nVidia chipsets. It’s been a source of annoyance ever since I built my current desktop, but the situation hasn’t improved and I’ve finally run out of patience. The straw that broke my back was the lack of motherboard temperature monitoring. Searching round the web there appears to be no open source support for the nVidia SMBus that is fitted to my motherboard so the various utilities that run under FreeBSD (mbmon is the one I’ve trusted for a while on other machines) won’t provide the information 🙁 I would reccomend anyone who is contemplating buying a motherboard with any nVidia chipset to abstain if they plan on running an open source operating system.
I really think it’s time that the hardware manafacturers stopped taking us all for a ride and started to play fair. If I buy their hardware they should at least be willing to make basic specifications and technical information available. nVidia seem to be about the worst company out there, so I won’t be buying any more of their hardware. I’m sure their bottom line won’t be affected by my stance, but if enough people did it then maybe they’d sit up and take notice. Like all large companies they only truly care about profits and until those are threatened they will continue doing business the same way.

Part of the problem is knowing which companies are better and willing to work with open source communities. There really should be mroe ifnormation about the positive experiences people have, but people have a tendancy to only write about the negatives online. I guess I’m as guilty as anyone for that!

My plan is to swap out my motherboard for one that isn’t infested with nVidia chipsets. AMD64, SATA raid and PCI-e are the basic requirements – oh and made by a manafacturuer who is open and fair allowing FreeBSD to fully support it 🙂