[OT] Re: nVidia installer needs kernel-source to compile driver

[Andrew Farris]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 08:07, William Hooper wrote:
> Albert DE WINT said:
> >
> > I know about newbies that run a non stock-kernel after 'up2date'
> > suggested to upgrade the kernel, which they did.
> 
> IIRC nVidia makes installers for those, too.
> 
They do, but not necessarily in reasonable timeframe which leads to many
people with broken machines until they can figure out the kernel-source
issue.  I am active on the nVidia Linux resource forum and trust me,
they need to have the kernel-source.  Why do we ever install a linux
distro without it?  If the sources are to be left out, I think it would
be very useful to also include mention of that fact in documentation
(its there now I'm sure but nobody seems to notice).

The only acceptable reason I would have for that is very low available
resource installations, which the installer should be adequately able to
handle (recognition of low-space and removal of kernel sources first
rather than blindly failing).

> >>
> >> This is off-topic for this list.
No, its not.  Mike Harris has repeatedly mentioned he is willing to work
on this issue, but he can't take it on all by himself as his
responsibility to RedHat's priorities come first.  The Fedora community
should certainly push this, as well as getting very smooth installation
of the ATI binaries for the newer cards.  Not binary driver inclusion,
but intelligent forethought and preparation for the use of the drivers. 
That is engineering of the OS, which this list should relate to (and to
keep the devel list cleaner).

> Searching the archives you will also find resistance to
> doing anything to make it easier for people to install drivers that are
> impossible to troubleshoot.
Nonsense.  The resistance isn't there, instead there is something of
apathy.  Just because the RedHat people can't go do it right now does
not preclude anyone here from doing so.

There are a couple people working on RPM based solutions, in which they
have scripts to clean up and prepare the system for the nVidia driver
before installation (lost link... I believe its a RFE somewhere tho). 
This is the answer IMHO.

-- 
Andrew Farris <fedora at andrewfarris.com>