On 09/08/07, Don Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> The objection is making it a priority over supporting free drivers or
> diverting people working on supporting vendors who provide DFSG free
> drivers by making it a distribution wide priority.
The free drivers are perfectly well supported as they are, and are
excellently maintained by a vast number of talented people from many
projects. The non-free ones are god-awful as a simple result of them being
closed source, and their installation and use can be calamatous for many,
and hence they require special coddling, methinks.... I am not in favour of
favouring anything over free software - if it were up to me, I'd just buy
one of Intel's excellent and proper-game-capable GPUs (which obviously I
can't, because they don't make any) - but once we have got over the fairly
simple hurdle of enforced freedom the issue just turns into a question of
how to make non-free drivers less nightmarish to install.
Since you appear to be interested in it quite a bit, you'd be well served by
> making it your priority.
I'm grossly underqualied in that respect, I fear. I can outline precisely
what needs to be done to make nvidia-glx, for example, bearable[1] (and it
does not involve a specialised GUI, god forbid) but am in no position at all
to do so :(
--
Ben Goodger
B.F. Goodger, Age 16½
[1] metapackage "nvidia-graphics-nonfree" or similar to not conflict with
the similarly named source package, to depend on nvidia-glx and the current
nvidia-kernel-{uname -r} and other appropriate packages, and a moderately
intelligent post-install script to parse /etc/X11/xorg.conf for the
appropriate settings and flag suspicious lines, with references to
appropriate wiki/man pages... eventually, this should become an "aptitude
install nvidia-graphics-nonfree" situation, without manual
xorg.conffiddling, and without bludgeoning the entire system
Automatix-style (may
require many weeks of tedious regexen, but it would IMO be worth it to Do
Things Properly, as is the Debian way.)
