[rescue] derail to Adaptec/Linux [Re: NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?]

[pakenned-list at pobox.com]

So, I'm derailing a bit--no experience with OS/2, but knew people who
were real devotees in the early/mid-nineties.

> Impressive! I wasn't that hardcore. I tried Slackware on the OS/2
> laptop but I never got it working -- setting the right parameters for
> the aha152x kernel module defeated me.

I was a slackware user (first booted and run from floppies in 2MB of
RAM, oh my.  This is a rescue story of another sort for later) and had
some experience with mucking with Adaptec hardware and drivers.

Adaptec on Linux was a particularly awful moving target.  I had some ISA
(heh) SCSI cards and they were better than nothing.  I got an UW card,
and could not rid myself of SCSI daemons.  Research into support
revealed developers complaining that Adaptec had released yet another
version of a chip that reported itself the same way.  It was a game of
cat and mouse where the user was the loser.  It made buying a card hit
and miss--who knows whether you are getting something that's supported
or not.  They were cheap, but not worth it.

I'm not surprised that you gave up on it.

I read (maybe in the source code?) about how BusLogic willingly provided
documentation and engineer time supporting some person in the Linux
community who was writing the driver.

I bought (a more expensive) BusLogic card and it was like night and day
(and thus started a migration away from Adaptec cards in my machines).

Cheers,
PAK