bear-despair

  • bortsampson [he/him, any]
    ·
    3 hours ago

    Is it just a generic framebuffer for graphics or are their open source drivers for commercial gpus? I wanted to make a cheap desktop to have a permanent learning environment on but I had trouble finding good information on hardware support. What would you recommend for a system suitable for tinkering?

    • Zvyozdochka [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 hours ago

      You'll definitely not be doing any hardware accelerated graphics shenanigans on 9, there isn't really any graphics drivers or anything of that sort, you just get a basic framebuffer and a library to draw basic 2D graphics which can still be plenty if you do some old school software rasterization.

      For hardware support you can see an incomplete list for 9front here: https://fqa.9front.org/fqa3.html I'd say you're probably safe to just pick up an old Dell Optiplex and some cheap generic USB peripherals and it'd probably work out of the box. I'd just double check the Ethernet situation so you can have networking since that's kind of the whole appeal of 9. Raspberry Pis are also supported and work fairly well in my testing and 9front provides images for them on their website.

      • bortsampson [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 hours ago

        I'm not too concerned about it being limited to 2d graphics. I just wanted to be sure I'd get a display output. I got an old dell lying around. Guess I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the info and recommendation!