Re: Knoppix 5.1 Mini-Announcement
On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 05:17:00AM -0800, Francesco Pietra wrote:
> nVidia cards, you mean nVidia chipsets? Without
> supporting them, many of us are lost. I would be lost
> with GeForce (PC) and nForce (Workstation).
Wait, it's no that they would not be supported at all. NVidia graphics
chipsets in general do work fine or "sufficiently well" with the usual
xorg 7.1 "nv" driver. For very problematic cases, you can still use
vesa (xmodule=vesa boot option) or framebuffer (xmodule=fb) as fallback.
So, you can use KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, work on the graphical desktop,
play FrozenBubble...
There are just no accellerated drivers for hese cards that could make
use of the 3D and RenderAccel functions, that you would need for playing
fast 3D-games or at least have DRI, which is needed for beryl as 3D
window manager. So, you will not be able to test beryl with these cards,
which is what I really wanted to say. It seems to be NVIdias decision
and company policy to "hide trade secrets" by only distributing
closed-source binary-only, restricted Linux kernel modules for their
cards, which is their right to do, since they are the manufacturers.
And because they run in critical kernel context, I am personally not
comfortable with these drivers because of security and
stability/warranty considerations, and therefore won't include them,
even if NVidias license would allow it (which is also arguable).
Maybe Martin Öhler is going to include the proprietary drivers in
Games-Knoppix, with permission of NVidia, I don't know. If he does,
I'm almost sure that he will also offer beryl as boot option.
It should also be possible to download and install the proprietary
drivers in the live system on-demand, if you can accept their license
and believe it is OK.
Hopefully this clears up this point. Or maybe it throws in even more
questions. Anyways. ;-)
> So far, I managed around the world with my pivot_root
> install of Knoppix 5.0.1, instead of the burden of a
> laptop. Hope to continue with new releases.
>
> Hope also that GNOME will replace KDE, or a choice is
> given between the two.
You have this choice with the DVD (desktop=kde vs. desktop=gnome), but
on he CD, we lack of enough space for including both systems, and I have
to chose something.
Btw, if you have a good Gnome config that should replace the very basic
Knoppix default configuration in Gnome, please feel free to send it to
us. I think that Gnome is woefully undercunfigured in Knoppix compared
to KDE, but I lack of time and Gnome experience to make a really nice
default config for that.
> Cheers Klause, you medae great stuff!
It's not out yet, and hopefully will not contain more bugs than he last
release. We are always aiming for the perfect release. :-)
Regards
-Klaus Knopper
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