NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 09:36:56 +0200,
  François Patte <francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr> wrote:
> 
> 1- My lab in my university has contracts with companies and I have to
> choose in a panel of offers. For computers, it is Dell and Dell's offer
> is with nvidia graphic. What can I do?

My work buys computers through Dell and I was able to get an ATI video
driver. However, I had to choose a Windows OS, since Dell didn't sell
models with Redhat and ATI video cards in the category of machine
(workstation) that I was choosing.

> 2- I am not a computer scientist, I use computers (like many people) and
> I do not want to waste a lot of time to find out how to configure new
> hardwares I have never seen before. I know how to configure nvidia
> graphic cards because we have many computers with nvidia. All cards, up
> to now, are from Geforce series and I did not know if Quadro series were
> supported by fedora OS.

ATI is actually easier since you don't need to do anything special. However,
I think right now there are issues with the level of support by the
free drivers. So if you really want easy to use and 3D support, you want
to wait for F12 (at least time frame wise, as the F11 drivers will be
getting improvements over time).

> 4- Why not believe that one day nvidia will make open sources drivers?
> Sun, is now going to furnish an open source jre. Why? Is it because a
> lot of people from linux community refused to use the free, but not open
> sources, Sun jre? I don't think so!

I think that had to do with someone writing a free replacement. At that point,
not competing with their own free version could end up with them losing
control. In the hardware market, the best way to get nVidia to provide specs
is not too buy their hardware. If it's costing them money not to provide
specs, they'll have incentive to change their behavior.