nVidia RIVA TNT - any success story?ll

[Kenny Speer]

You're kidding right?  Did you RTFM on the drivers?  Run their "binary" 
with -x and guess what?  You have the full source, complete and ready to 
be hacked which I have done in order to get APM working when they 
decided to comment all of the code out (i admit quite awhile ago).  Try 
it again, while they might not be GPL (i didn't bother to verify) they 
do provide the source.  I don't have an NVidia in this laptop but here 
is your source:

[kspeer at ks-fedlin64 nv]$ ls
conftest.sh          nv.c         nv-misc.h       os-interface.h
gcc-version-check.c  nv.h         nvtypes.h       os-registry.c
makedevices.sh       nv-kernel.o  os-agp.c        README
Makefile             nv-linux.h   os-agp.h        rmretval.h
Makefile.kbuild      nv-memdbg.h  os-interface.c
[kspeer at ks-fedlin64 nv]$ pwd
/home/downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-5332-pkg0/usr/src/nv
[kspeer at ks-fedlin64 nv]$

On your other pointsL
1.  have fun, there it is
2.  ok, you got me, but in reality if you really want optimized drivers 
you always need to go to the vendor and they hardly want to let folks 
redistribute due to business logic
3.  if you're looking for src, why is this a big deal?  With many many 
features you need to mod config files by hand, this is the way of linux 
today
4.  ok, well the average user doesn't update libraries making point 3 
moot, removing and re-installing a kernel module can be easily scripted 
for anyone who cares to do so
5.  don't update your kernel as often, the average user doesn't change 
their kernel, in fact this is why major vendors such as RH have the 
*kernel* as skipped packages as the default for updates.

You could find many many ways to bash vendors, I personally would rather 
like to see more act like NVidia.  Where are my Broadcom drivers for 
54G?  Or the ATI drivers?  Or my ACPI support from my laptop vendor? 
NVidia is farther along than any other vendor I know of in supporting Linux.

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kenny Speer" <kenny.speer at comcast.net>
> To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases"
> <fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2004 11:19 PM
> Subject: Re: nVidia RIVA TNT - any success story?ll
> 
> 
> 
>>If you have an NVidia card you should use the drivers from NVidia.  They
>>are very good at providing linux drivers for their cards (unlike ATI).
>>They have always worked great for me.  Go to their website and download
>>the drivers. If you need to, just use Vesa until you get the correct
>>drivers.  They will almost surely be better than the ones that ship with
>>   either XFree or the kernel.
> 
> 
> Umm. The NVidia drivers are not full drivers. They are non-GPL kernel
> modules which provide the hooks to run their modified version of the OpenGL
> libraries, and they replace your OpenGL libraries without recording the
> change in your RPM package management. This means several things:
> 
>     1: You can't debug or improve their drivers.
>     2: You can't distribute their kernel drivers as part of a GPL package,
> which makes it hard to sell the OS as a package with the drivers installted.
>     3: You can't integrate it into the Xconfigurator or other such tools,
> you have to edit your XF86Config or Xorg.conf files by hand.
>     4: If you update your OpenGL libraries, you have to first un-install and
> then after updating re-install the NVidia drivers.
>     5: If you update your kernel, you'll have to ercompile the NVidia kernel
> modules by hand.
> 
> Etc., etc., etc. This is not "very good at providing Linux drivers", this is
> "giving a teensy-weensy acknowledgement of a growing market".
> 
>