FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

[Robin Laing]

Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 01:21:15PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>>>I sort
>>>of like the idea of having users take the extra efforts to get the
>>>binary only software installed so they at least recognize that there is
>>>a distinction.
>>
>>Yes, especially if they notice that the distinction is that the people
>>who build the hardware do a better job of writing the drivers.
> 
> 
> They often don't though.  That's the problem, and it's been proven out
> throughout the history of Linux.
> 
> Intel took over the maintenance of the ether pro 100 driver.  What
> happened?  Tranceiver lock-ups when the card got busy.  Adaptec took
> over maintenance of the AIC7xxx drivers for Linux.  What happened?
> CRASH.  And the proprietary NVidia drivers are widely known to crash
> systems... even with kernels that they used to develop and test the
> driver on.  Granted, the XFree/Xorg drivers lack the performance and
> some of the features of the proprietary driver, but they also don't
> crash my system.  AFAIK, the same is true of the other OSS drivers,
> including the DRI ones.
> 
> The only reason the OSS NVidia driver isn't better than the
> proprietary one is because the vendor won't release the specs to code
> the thing.
> 
> 

I don't have any crashes with the nVidia drivers.  My uptimes are 
based on kernel update releases plus a few weeks (I am slow to reboot).

I do agree that if more people have access to the code, things should 
only get better.

-- 
Robin Laing