video card driver necessary?

[Robin Laing]

alan wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Jul 2007, yk wrote:
> 
>> Hi,there.
>> I've been wondering the question "Is video card driver really 
>> necessary for my Linux box?(quite dummy,I know)" since the very first 
>> time installation of Fedora~
>> I mean,the  universal video card driver sailed with fedora is good.
>> What's more,I broke my fedora when I try to install a ATI driver once~
>> So would you guys let me know  is there *any* goodies that a video 
>> card driver can do to me?
> 
> It really depends on your video card.
> 
> Hardware acceleration is a good thing.  If you use anything that needs 
> OpenGL or any sort of 3D acceleration, then you may need to consider the 
> "commercial" drivers.  (That is, if there is support for your video 
> card. ATI does not support all the cards they currently sell.  Always 
> check the manufacturer's site for more information.)
> 
> More and more modern programs need hardware and/or 3D acceleration.  It 
> used to be just games and CAD programs.  Now it is desktop environments 
> like Compiz/Beryl/Compiz-Fusion-bjork-bjork-bjork, screensavers, 
> animation packages, and whatever else seemed like a good idea at the time.
> 
> I have used various incarnations of with and without hardware 
> acceleration.  Even with the closed source driver issues, having 
> hardware acceleration is far less frustrating than not having it.
> 

My daughter can lock up my Nvidia based destop almost at will.  Xorg is 
using all the processing power and if I ssh into the machine and kill 
it, then all is well.

Keyboard response is gone, so no other terminal can be opened locally. 
I am going to try to debug this but it never happened before putting in 
the Nvidia driver from Livna.


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Robin Laing