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

[Derek Martin]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 04:53:38AM -0500, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> >They are clearly not up to the task.  Not that we should expect they
> >would be; it's a pretty big task...  But it becomes a small task if
> >nvidia either releases source code for their drivers, or releases
> >complete specs to their hardware, so that a driver can be written and
> >maintained as part of the Linux kernel proper.
> 
> But (rightly or wrongly) video card makers consider these two pieces of 
> information to be their competitive edge.  So you are not likely to see 
> them releasing either, at least for their latest cards.  Also, Linux users 
> still aren't a very large fraction of their customer base.

I'm well aware of the reasons...  But support for their hardware (or
rather usability of it) suffers because of them.

As for what fraction of their customer base uses Linux, those are some
statistics I'd like to see...  But I think it raises some interesting
questions, like what percentage of their users actually use both? What
percentage of Linux users who DON'T use their hardware would switch if
there were native drivers?

Also don't forget that there are other free OSes, such as the *BSD
family (and still others as well).  All of these would benefit from
such a release as well...  When you add up all users of all free OSes,
how does that compare to say, users of Mac OS X?  I'm not sure, but I
believe I have read that it is much larger...

> It also would be a small task if there were standards that allowed them to 
> write a single installer that would work with any distribution, without 
> having to deal with loads of special cases.

This is largely impossible.  In this case we're dealing with the
kernel, so the reasons are slightly different (but very similar) than
for application programs.

The kernel is very actively developed.  The distribution vendors often
make their own custom modifications, to enhance functionality or
performance, or just to fix bugs.  For a hardware vendor to maintain
its own binary-only driver which is compatible with all of these
varying kernels is a task which is, practically speaking, essentially
impossible.  So, from time to time, with various kernels, their driver
will crash your system.  

I found this to be the case with a recent release of their driver and
glx libs in combination with a recent release of the kernel.  After
updating from Livna maybe a month ago, my system locked up hard with
the latest kernel and glx stuff when X tried to start, even after
rebooting several times.  Reverting to an older glx library fixed the
problem for me.

I guess I do not "blame" them for wanting to keep their trade secrets,
but when the newest release of their drivers crashes your system, the
above is the direct cause, even if you can argue that the "fault"
isn't theirs...  The only practical solution is for them to release
the code, whether or not they are willing to do so.

> Nevertheless, I've found that the NVIDIA drivers work reasonably well.  

Usually.  Unless they crash your system, which happens from time to
time, i.e. this was not the first time.  Also with certain earlier
versions of their driver, my system would experience random lock-ups
while I was using it (which for my money is a lot more annoying than
crashing at boot time).  Both the last version I used and the version
I am using now don't seem to suffer from that problem...

> You could also "blame" Red Hat and Fedora for their policy of not 
> including proprietary/binary-only packages in their distributions.  

No, I think you really can't; in many cases (if not all) it is illegal
for them to do so, which is a large part of why they don't do it.
Even if it is not illegal in your country, it might be in many
others...  Their hands are tied.  But, this is why we have the extras
and Livna RPM repositories...

> I admire them for sticking to their guns on this issue, but it does
> affect usability, particularly with respect to cartain hardware
> drivers and multimedia codecs.

Which are illegal for them to redistribute, because they are
proprietary.  Or, they would have to pay licensing fees in some cases,
which means they would have to charge you (more) for their products.
I agree this is inconvenient, but I'd much rather suffer some
inconvenience than see Red Hat sued out of existence...  Don't you
agree?  :-)

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D