Bug#141497: install-doc: Section 2.6.1 of the installation manual is plain wrong
Package: install-doc
Version: N/A; reported 2002-04-06
Severity: normal
In section 2.6.1 of the Woody installation manual that can be found at
http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/install.en.txt
it says
| Some hardware manufacturers simply won't tell us how to write drivers
| for their hardware. Others won't allow us access to the documentation
| without a non-disclosure agreement that would prevent us from
| releasing the Linux source code. One example is the Nvidia graphics
| chips used in many newer consumer 3D graphics cards. Other graphics
| vendors such as ATI and Matrox do provide information.
|
| Since we haven't been granted access to the documentation on these
| devices, they simply won't work under Linux. You can help by asking
| the manufacturers of such hardware to release the documentation. If
| enough people ask, they will realize that the free software community
| is an important market.
which is just plain wrong (or really outdated), as even nVidia cards
work out-of-the-box with XFree 4.1.x without the need to install the
drivers provided by nVidia on their website.
Specifically,
http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/Status22.html
says
| 22. NVIDIA
|
| [...]
|
| 4.1.0:
|
| Support (accelerated) for the Riva 128, 128ZX, TNT, TNT2 (Ultra,
| Vanta, M64), GeForce (DDR, 256), GeForce 2 (GTS, Ultra, MX),
| GeForce 3, Quadro, and Quadro2 is provided by the "nv" driver.
|
| Summary:
|
| All chipsets supported in 3.3.6 except the NV1 are also
| supported in 4.1.0. Support for the newer chips (GeForce2 and
| later) is only available in 4.1.0.
which means that "they simply won't work under Linux" is bogus, but
may prevent people who already own a nVidia graphics card from
installing and using Debian, which seems rather counterproductive to me,
whether they're using hardware that isn't free-as-in-speech (but that
DOES work in Debian) or not...
-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux www 2.2.20 #1 SMP Thu Mar 21 15:53:43 CET 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: