Re: Inspiron 8000 & Progeny install woes
On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 05:28:45PM +0100, Vivek Dasmohapatra wrote:
> On Fri, 18 May 2001, Jim Richardson wrote:
>
> > Which video card would you recommend for this laptop? (I am about to buy
> > one) the GeForce or ATi?
>
> iirc, nvidia require you to use a binary only driver, which means you'd be
> pretty much on your own if you had kernel related problems, as nobody
> outside of nvidia would have the info needed to help you. I could be
> wrong though.
There is a Free driver in XF86 called "nv" that supports GeForce chips, but
it doesn't do 3D accel at all AFAIK. (If it does do any 3d stuff, it's very
likely a lot slower than the closed-source drivers from nvidia.) The
binary-only drivers work well (They have the same codebase as the windoze
drivers, so the OpenGL implementation is actual certified as OpenGL,
officially.) , but really suck from the point of view of running a Free
system, since there's a kernel module as well as an X server module and
OpenGL libraries. The kernel mod comes with some wrapper code to interface
with the rest of the kernel, so you can run whatever kernel you want and
recompile the module as needed. I've got a GF2 MX in my desktop machine,
and it kicks ass, but requires all that proprietary software :(
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
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