Re: intel extreme graphics chipset
On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 13:09 +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote:
> Dear folks,
>
> I noticed from reading an article by Eric S Raymond (http://catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html) that according to him Intel released the source code for its own graphics processors to the Linux community.
>
> He therefore encouraged Linux users to buy the intel hardware to encourage the company to keep doing this.
>
> I tried googling to see how easy it was for an intel PC with e.g. the extreme graphics chipset stuck in it to have Debian installed on it and also how easy the OS recognised the graphics chip relative to e.g. putting an Nvidia or ATI graphics card into the machine.
Trivial.
> Someone told me that now ATI have released the source for their graphics cards to the linux community.
>
> Is this true?
There's been a large code dump. Nothing useful has come of it yet.
> What would suit me is being able to buy a 64 bit PC with a graphics chip in it which Linux (Debian) recognizes very easily.
Plenty of such machines available. Laptops or desktops or DIY.
> I don't mind if the graphics 3D acceleration is not quite as fast as say an Nvidia card if the installation is reliable and predictable.
ATI under Linux is about 3x slower than NVidia under Linux. ATI with
open-source drivers is about 3x slower than that. Does "9x slower, give
or take" come under the heading of "not quite as fast"?
> Talking to intel about this was hard work. It wanted me to talk to PC resellers who thought I wanted to buy something unusual that they didn't sell very often.
>
>
> It was a bit like trying to buy a washing machine from a hardware store in Soviet Russia in the 1960s.
Or perhaps more like trying to buy washing machine belts from their
corporate HQ, rather than a consumer machine from a consumer company?
> Has anyone heard of someone who bought or built such an Intel based PC and made it work?
Lots. Try http://system76.com/index.php?cPath=27 or
https://secure.dnuk.com/store/workstations.php#core2duo as first-effort
links.
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/ Jo Shields <jms@osc.ox.ac.uk> \
| Systems Manager, |
\ Oxford Supercomputing Centre /
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