On Fri 07 Mar 2003 21:18, George Mitchell posted as excerpted below: > Non productive work? How about 3D accelleration that doesn't work on > Radeon cards? Is that one of the things you consider trivial and not > worth correcting? I have a Radeon VE that works flawlessly on install > with Red Hat 8.0. It is a screaming mess on install with Mandrake 9.0 > and still is not working with Cooker which is just about ready to > release. Problems with ATI and nVidea products. Only the two most > popular video cards on the market.
.. And the two that prefer to make proprietary drivers rather than, if they want the speed and quality, making their work fully open.. Have you tried the software proprietare drivers from ATI on it? I have to run NVidia's software proprietare drivers because I am running dual video out on that card, and the software libre drivers don't work. I'd be extremely surprised if Mdk could or even would choose to put the software proprietare drivers on the freely downloadable disks. It's possible they might put it on the extra software proprietare disks they have in the commercial distrib versions, but obviously, that's not going to be in the main code base. You basically have to go d/l the software proprietare from the manufacturer's site yourself, and install it yourself. Of course, keep in mind that if ATI is like Nvidia in that regard, the ABI to the kernel is what they must use, and that changes with each version. Thus, there are limited kernel matches, one each for standard and enterprise kernel for each official release, but nothing for each cooker kernel update, or if you compile your own kernel. For those, you have to get the SRPM or tarballs and compile the kernel wrapper interface to the proprietary binary module yourself, so it matches the kernel you have deployed. Despite the additional cost for Matrox cards in particular based on their 3D performance (they tend to be good 2D performers, but not so good @ 3D), I'm seriously considering getting only them from now on.. Well, either that, or SiS/Via/whatever gpu/chipset cards, that have software libre drivers that exploit the full power of the card, low tho that might be, as at least then I'm not blowing $$ on features I can't use w/o serious hassle on Linux, due to their software proprietare policies. (I should mention that in NVidia's case at least, they claim the reason they don't fully support software libre drivers is that they have licensed intellectual property from other holders, and those licenses don't allow them to go the software libre route. That's a potentially valid arguement, but IMO, I'd rather simply do w/o those features then, and use a card a bit more plain jane, if necessary. Yes, it WILL affect my purchasing decisions from here on out. The reason I have the Nvidia now is because I got it b4 I switched to Linux, and while I checked that drivers were available for Linux as I was thinking about switching, I didn't realize there was this particular angle of it to worry about until I switched, and by then I already had the card.) -- Duncan "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
