Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Curtis L. Olson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I do look out for drivers _before_ I buy a card for my or my customers' PeeCee (currently I don't even own a PC ;-) Is it sgi machines that you run on? It became sort of a hobby to collect used Unix workstations. I have an Octane with MXI graphics and TRAM as workplace at home, but this machine (only 195 MHz) turned out not being able to keep up with recent development. Its CPU is simply too slow and can't cope with all the trees and buildings. I still wonder why this brings the machine to its knees because there are a lot of applications out there, displaying fancy stuff on such a machine at reasonable frame rates. Maybe these applications' characteristics are not comparable to flight simulation and the software probaböy is specifically optimized for SGI's graphics subsystem. I also have a HP Visualize C240 (donation from a customer) but this one also has only 200 MHz CPU cycle. I have an RS6k with 200 MHz (per CPU, eight of them) which won't serve, the SPARC has only 90 MHz (maximum, depending on what CPU set I put into it). The old Motorola based machines will be _waaay_ too slow. I have e workplace at a customer's location with a PC where I plugged my own graphics card which serves as temporary FlightGear testbed, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Curtis L. Olson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Martin Spott writes: Not many, but on the other hand you won't have much trouble with the BIOS when you think about a standalone FlightGear CD. Dealing with a bunch of different kernel modules for autodetecting different vendors' cards might prove to end in a huge mess. This _is_ very pragmatic thinking, I don't think this big mess is the fault of vendors with binary drivers. Especially the mess with NVidia's drivers is the manufacturer's fault. ATI at least _tries_ to conform with the standards proposed by the DRI. With ATI you can copy the DRI driver module and the kernel module (after tweaking the build script) to the appropriate places. With NVidia (at least the last time I looked at their drivers) you have to: a) Unload the kernel's GART module during the autodetection and load NVidia's special kernel module, b) replace the OpenGL libraries, c) run a special X Server. _This_ is what I'd call a huge mess. I don't like ATI's approach either but these guys show that things could have been done at least in a significant better way. Yes, there was no 3D standard for Linux when 3D boards for PeeCees became affordable. But NVidia's driver effort was very late as well. They _would_ have had the chance to stick to DRI standards but they simply don't have any interest into doing anything different from their own way. Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Hi Martin, Martin Spott writes: Especially the mess with NVidia's drivers is the manufacturer's fault. ATI at least _tries_ to conform with the standards proposed by the DRI. With ATI you can copy the DRI driver module and the kernel module (after tweaking the build script) to the appropriate places. With NVidia (at least the last time I looked at their drivers) you have to: I will address these points, since they are mostly false and/or misleading. a) Unload the kernel's GART module during the autodetection and load NVidia's special kernel module, Nvidia's kernel module does have an AGP driver, but it is smart enough to not activate this portion of the driver if the linux GART module is already there. As far as I know it has always been this way. Depending on your system, one or the other may work better for you though, so the nvidia readme encourages try the other one if you have problems with the first. And nvidia does provide full source for their own kernel module. b) replace the OpenGL libraries, Yes this is allowed. Unfortunately XFree86/Mesa don't (or at least didn't) put the opengl libs where the linux standard said they should, nvidia did. That causes a huge mess if you have multiple opengl libs on your system and you aren't sure which one's your app is picking up. Like I say, this was a big mess before nvidia got involved. Especially consider that prior to that, the only way to do opengl in a window on linux was with a voodoo3 card. To get this running, you pretty much had to grab XFree86 cvs tree and build it yourself. This was 100x harder to get running than the approach nvidia used. c) run a special X Server. Nvidia gives you a new driver (nvidia vs. nv) for your X server, but you have never needed a special X server. _This_ is what I'd call a huge mess. I will continue to assert that what nvidia was trying to plug into was already a huge mess in terms of supporting hardware accelerated opengl within XFree86. This is a hard problem and many smart people were struggling with it. They came up with a reasonable solution, DRI, but it just wasn't ready to go when nvidia was ready to go. You at least have to credit nvidia for going out on a bit of a limb at the time to even support linux. This was *huge* for people who had been struggling along with voodoo1,2,3 cards and were living with very frustrating bugs in Mesa or in mesa's interface to the voodoo cards. Suddenly along came nvidia and we were able to get fast and correct rendering for the first time ever under linux. This was huge! I personally am very greatful to nvidia for this. They made linux a viable 3d platform. I don't like ATI's approach either but these guys show that things could have been done at least in a significant better way. Yes, there was no 3D standard for Linux when 3D boards for PeeCees became affordable. But NVidia's driver effort was very late as well. They _would_ have had the chance to stick to DRI standards but they simply don't have any interest into doing anything different from their own way. nvidia's effort was a *lot* earlier than ATI's. Yes there was some disappointment that they didn't follow the DRI standards, but I think you can make a plausible argument that the DRI standard was not fully fleshed out when nvidia started developing their linux drivers. I still don't see how any of this rises to the level of causing someone to boycott their company. And as you say, you are running hp, sgi, and ibm machines. I can't imagine every byte of code on those machines is fully open source. If you are actually running all open source operating systems and drivers on all these machines, then you are definitely not doing any opengl on those machines. Again, I see absolutely no problem with running the vendor's os, or linux or whatever you want on those machines, but I find it a bit odd that you are arguing so strongly for others to not run any proprietary code or drivers, when clearly you must be doing this yourself. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Martin writes: It became sort of a hobby to collect used Unix workstations. I have an Octane with MXI graphics and TRAM as workplace at home, but this machine (only 195 MHz) turned out not being able to keep up with recent development. Its CPU is simply too slow and can't cope with all the trees and buildings. I still wonder why this brings the machine to its knees because there are a lot of applications out there, displaying fancy stuff on such a machine at reasonable frame rates. Maybe these applications' characteristics are not comparable to flight simulation and the software probab=F6y is specifically optimized for SGI's graphics subsyste= m. I also have a HP Visualize C240 (donation from a customer) but this one also has only 200 MHz CPU cycle. I have an RS6k with 200 MHz (per CPU, eight of them) which won't serve, the SPARC has only 90 MHz (maximum, depending on what CPU set I put into it). The old Motorola based machines will be _waaay_ too slow. Hi Martin, So should I assume that you are running fully open-source operating systems, and fully open-source drivers on all your own hardware? :-) I have e workplace at a customer's location with a PC where I plugged my own graphics card which serves as temporary FlightGear testbed, I would love to hear which card/drivers you are using at your customer's location. Are there any rendering bugs? Any odd xserver crashes? What kind of performance are you getting compared to nvidia. If you have found a rock solid, high performance, correctly rendering open-source solution, I'm sure a lot of people would love to hear the specific details. For my day job I manage a research driving sim. We run linux on all our visual channels and are using nvidia hardware/drivers. For this system we can't tolerate driver crashes or rendering errors. This system isn't for play or hobby or expermentation, it is for doing real, paid research so it needs to work all the time. (To be fair, there are many other reasons why it doesn't work all the time, but none of them are video/3d/driver related.) If there is a 3d card with open-source drivers that could perform as well as nvidia in a do-or-die environment, I'd like to hear about it, because to date, I have yet to see anything else that compares. Regards, CUrt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Martin Spott wrote: a) Unload the kernel's GART module during the autodetection and load NVidia's special kernel module, b) replace the OpenGL libraries, c) run a special X Server. Martin, just stop this flaming; b is true. a and c are not, and have never been. NVidia's drivers install themselves, they're actually significantly easier to install than a new DRI release is (yes, I've done both many times). And they have a release cycle of 3-4 months or so, instead of the 1 year you have to wait between X releases. Yes, they're proprietary software. But the installation quality is actually quite good. If you don't like proprietary software, then just say so and leave it at that. Don't invent problems and fan the flames. Andy ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Curtis L. Olson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: a) Unload the kernel's GART module during the autodetection and load NVidia's special kernel module, Nvidia's kernel module does have an AGP driver, but it is smart enough to not activate this portion of the driver if the linux GART module is already there. As my memory serves this was not the case with early GeForce drivers and I'm glad to hear that things changed in the meantime. Depending on your system, one or the other may work better for you though, so the nvidia readme encourages try the other one if you have problems with the first. And nvidia does provide full source for their own kernel module. There might be some misunderstanding here - I assume you mean the GART part of their kernel module. They still link the 'nv-kernel.o' binary object into their module. b) replace the OpenGL libraries, Yes this is allowed. Unfortunately XFree86/Mesa don't (or at least didn't) put the opengl libs where the linux standard said they should, nvidia did. I'd expect libGL in /usr/lib/ where every other Unix puts it. To my knowledge XFree86 doesn't behave different by default - you can choose a different location on compile time by putting a 'host.def' with: #define NothingOutsideProjectRoot YES [...] That causes a huge mess if you have multiple opengl libs on your system [...] I'd try to avoid having multiple sets of the same libraries and I can confirm that this calls for trouble by default. I've been maintaining my own Linux 'distribution' with the compiler for nearly 10 years now and I must admit that I spent lots of time experiencing that you get really bad results if you compile and install a set of libraries without proper removing the remains of the previous version :-) c) run a special X Server. Nvidia gives you a new driver (nvidia vs. nv) for your X server, but you have never needed a special X server. Good to know, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Martin Spott wrote: a) Unload the kernel's GART module during the autodetection and load NVidia's special kernel module, Nope - it'll use kernel GART, or its own internal one. b) replace the OpenGL libraries, The installer does this automatically c) run a special X Server. Nope - it just installs a new xfree driver, and changes the config to reference that (as nvidia instead of the old one as nv) You download 1 script, and run it. That's all. -- Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Melchior FRANZ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] But I don't feel like making a fgfs CD. The problems with licenses of different proprietary graphic cards aren't such a great motivation. I tend to include OpenSource drivers only, no proprietary stuff. There are enough cards with OpenSource drivers available that are usuable for FlightGear - the usual DRI, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
* Martin Spott -- Sunday 21 December 2003 00:07: I tend to include OpenSource drivers only, no proprietary stuff. I understand, but then the whole effort is pretty useless. There are too many nVidia card users, and no open source 3D drivers for them. m. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Melchior FRANZ wrote: * Martin Spott -- Sunday 21 December 2003 00:07: I tend to include OpenSource drivers only, no proprietary stuff. I understand, but then the whole effort is pretty useless. There are too many nVidia card users, and no open source 3D drivers for them. And the open source drivers don't support some of the newer ATI cards. So you're left with something which performs rather unspectacularly, or not at all. If we *could* include the drivers then we would have something very useful, but without them I agree - it's rather useless. -- Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Melchior FRANZ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Martin Spott -- Sunday 21 December 2003 00:07: I tend to include OpenSource drivers only, no proprietary stuff. I understand, but then the whole effort is pretty useless. There are too many nVidia card users, and no open source 3D drivers for them. As you already said: [...] The problems with licenses of different proprietary graphic cards aren't such a great motivation. I second that. Why shouldn't people use cards with OpenSource drivers for a presentation of an OpenSource flight simulator ? FlightGear developers are _that_ much careful when it's about including other people's work. Why shouldn't they take the same care for their graphics card drivers ? Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Martin Spott wrote: As you already said: [...] The problems with licenses of different proprietary graphic cards aren't such a great motivation. I second that. Why shouldn't people use cards with OpenSource drivers for a presentation of an OpenSource flight simulator ? FlightGear developers are _that_ much careful when it's about including other people's work. Why shouldn't they take the same care for their graphics card drivers ? Because the graphics card vendor might allow that (but I haven't checked if that's true). Erik ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Martin Spott writes: Melchior FRANZ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Martin Spott -- Sunday 21 December 2003 00:07: I tend to include OpenSource drivers only, no proprietary stuff. I understand, but then the whole effort is pretty useless. There are too many nVidia card users, and no open source 3D drivers for them. As you already said: [...] The problems with licenses of different proprietary graphic cards aren't such a great motivation. I second that. Why shouldn't people use cards with OpenSource drivers for a presentation of an OpenSource flight simulator ? FlightGear developers are _that_ much careful when it's about including other people's work. Why shouldn't they take the same care for their graphics card drivers ? The problem is that the best quality, highest performance cards are either made by nvidia and ATI with binary only drivers. The open-source drivers have flaws and are lower quality. I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just that the in-house nvidia/ati developers have a huge advantage over the open-source developers in terms of access to card info and assistance with problems. These binary only drivers are given away for free; I personally don't have a problem with using them. People have to work and feed their families too. Open-source is great, and I'm proud to be part of one of the larger open source projects out there. But personally, I don't mind if FlightGear runs on top of proprietary operating systems or drivers such as Mac OS, sgi, windows, solaris, or a binary nvidia driver on linux. There needs to be a balance between idealism and pragmatism. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
RE: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Curtis L. Olson writes: But personally, I don't mind if FlightGear runs on top of proprietary operating systems or drivers such as Mac OS, sgi, windows, solaris, or a binary nvidia driver on linux. There needs to be a balance between idealism and pragmatism. Taking the paragmatic route a little further -- I wonder how many machines running FGFS are running with an Open Source BIOS ? Norman ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And the open source drivers don't support some of the newer ATI cards. Sorry, why do you buy cards that are not supported by OpenSource drivers ? You are developing OpenSource software, why don't you take care of that. I can't accept this as a valid argument. I do look out for drivers _before_ I buy a card for my or my customers' PeeCee (currently I don't even own a PC ;-) Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Martin Spott writes: Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And the open source drivers don't support some of the newer ATI cards. Sorry, why do you buy cards that are not supported by OpenSource drivers ? You are developing OpenSource software, why don't you take care of that. I can't accept this as a valid argument. I do look out for drivers _before_ I buy a card for my or my customers' PeeCee (currently I don't even own a PC ;-) Is it sgi machines that you run on? Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Norman Vine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Taking the paragmatic route a little further -- I wonder how many machines running FGFS are running with an Open Source BIOS ? Not many, but on the other hand you won't have much trouble with the BIOS when you think about a standalone FlightGear CD. Dealing with a bunch of different kernel modules for autodetecting different vendors' cards might prove to end in a huge mess. This _is_ very pragmatic thinking, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Martin Spott writes: Not many, but on the other hand you won't have much trouble with the BIOS when you think about a standalone FlightGear CD. Dealing with a bunch of different kernel modules for autodetecting different vendors' cards might prove to end in a huge mess. This _is_ very pragmatic thinking, I don't think this big mess is the fault of vendors with binary drivers. OpenGL support on Linux has historically been a big mess and it's still a pain to get going on a lot of systems and especially for new users. Much of this is because Linux/XFree86 just didn't have infrastructure to support it in the early days when 3d cards started to become available for pc's. If there had been a driver standard when all this started, I'm sure companies like nvidia would have adopted it. But there wasn't (DRI was under development, but it just wasn't there quickly enough.) Nvidia chose to go their own route so they could get drivers out the door. But this discussion is getting very political and we do a *lot* better if we concentrate on FlightGear rather than politics! Thanks, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
From: Martin Spott [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And the open source drivers don't support some of the newer ATI cards. Sorry, why do you buy cards that are not supported by OpenSource drivers ? You are developing OpenSource software, why don't you take care of that. I can't accept this as a valid argument. I do look out for drivers _before_ I buy a card for my or my customers' PeeCee (currently I don't even own a PC ;-) There is little point making a Linux based LiveCD of FGFS, if it can only be used on specific computers that a knowledgable person has already checked. With that constraint, we might as well either (a) do a full manual install of Linux with the driver downloading, or (b) use the Windows version of FGFS and set the CDROM up for AutoRun. Remember, the idea of the LiveCD was that people could use it at home. From the pragmatic point of view, if (b) is the right way to go, I've got no objections to making the script up on a Linux machine then burning a copy of the standard AutoRun FGFS image with the new script file inserted. I won't be able to _use_ the CDROM myself, but I can still hand it out ... ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
Alex Perry writes: From: Martin Spott [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jon Stockill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And the open source drivers don't support some of the newer ATI cards. Sorry, why do you buy cards that are not supported by OpenSource drivers ? You are developing OpenSource software, why don't you take care of that. I can't accept this as a valid argument. I do look out for drivers _before_ I buy a card for my or my customers' PeeCee (currently I don't even own a PC ;-) There is little point making a Linux based LiveCD of FGFS, if it can only be used on specific computers that a knowledgable person has already checked. With that constraint, we might as well either (a) do a full manual install of Linux with the driver downloading, or (b) use the Windows version of FGFS and set the CDROM up for AutoRun. Remember, the idea of the LiveCD was that people could use it at home. From the pragmatic point of view, if (b) is the right way to go, I've got no objections to making the script up on a Linux machine then burning a copy of the standard AutoRun FGFS image with the new script file inserted. I won't be able to _use_ the CDROM myself, but I can still hand it out ... Alex, For what it's worth, the cd distribution I've assembled has a ready to run copy of windows flightgear on it. Just pop in the cd, double click on the runfgfs.bat file and you are up and running. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
* Martin Spott -- Saturday 20 December 2003 19:36: I've already been investigating the Knoppix a few months ago - but for whatever reason I didn't find out how people are extracting the necessary base for sevral projects that use Knoppix. I've successfully remastered a Knoppix CD and made my own favor of Knoppix, added some programs, removed others, and before all: set my own desktop theme (focus under mouse!). It wasn't really difficult. But I don't feel like making a fgfs CD. The problems with licenses of different proprietary graphic cards aren't such a great motivation. And then there is my bandwidth limitation ... m. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Re: LiveCD for FGFS - suggestion
* Melchior FRANZ -- Saturday 20 December 2003 23:21: I've successfully remastered a Knoppix CD and made my own favor flavor :-] m. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel