Attention: Proprietary video driver users (ATI, Nvidia, etc.)

[Mike A. Harris]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 20:07 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
>>Both ATI and Nvidia, and perhaps even other 3rd party drivers out there
>>come in some form of tarball or equivalent form from the particular
>>vendor.
> 
> 
> The Intel driver is worse than that, in some ways. In that case you
> don't even need to seek out and install separate software; a clean
> Fedora installation out of the box will run binary-only code supplied by
> your board manufacturer, without really giving you much clue that it's
> doing so.
> 
> I recently purchased a board with Intel i915 graphics, because I was led
> to believe that it had a fully open source driver -- and now I've found
> that all the mode setup is in binary-only code. So I can't make it do
> the PAL output modes for which I purchased it.

Yeah, that's a situation that continues to suck bigtime.  The
i[89]resolution utilities hack around it in some cases, but it's
still just an ugly hack, and doesn't work all the time.

Oddly enough though, the i810 driver is currently the most video
vendor supported driver.  Hopefully Intel will change their tune
about mode programming documentation in the future.


-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.