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
which Radeon cards? There are 27 kinds of Radeon cards, starting
from R100 to R300 and now also R350 with Radeon 9800. To me on Radeon 7500 mobility of cooker 4.3.0 works fine with full DRI 3D acceleration
(apart a small problem at 1600x1200x24, but #2634), and was working since
8.2.
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
AFAIK the ATI 2.5.1 closed drivers, right now needed for 3D on ATI 9500/9700,
compiles but doesn't work on current cooker. Furthermore they are built on top of and old XFree 4.2.X.
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
yep, apart licenses, we don't place in main, things for which there aren't
sources. AFAIK remember latest one was netscape 4.79.
For instance NVidia drivers contains libGLcore.so.1.0.4141 binary only libraries, NVidia-kernel contains some sources, but the nv-kernel.o is
binary only. Ditto for winmodems (lt, conexant), etc.: they have glue
.C code, but often a binary only object file.
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
and not even for official kernel updates.
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
Matrox G450/G550 are well supported on 3D, although they even have a closed source module (not included in XFree86, but supported changing some compilation %define flag in the SPEC file): the HALLib.
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.
Matrox would have good 3D performance on Parhelia, but they don't release even closed source drivers for it.
(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
seems things got from Silicon Graphics per libGL or proprietary texture compression techniques.
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.)
Consider also that NVidia drivers contains modules built with obsolete compilers like egcs 1.1.2 (see for instance libGLcore.so.1.0.4191) that any distribution no longer uses since two years...
Bye. Giuseppe.
