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Re: VGA cards



On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:54:53 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:

> On 2009-12-14 13:28 +0100, Camaleón wrote:

>>> Be sure to avoid Nvidia graphics cards then.
>>
>> Why?
>>
>> There is "nv" driver (2D) and soon it will be "nouveau" (2D+3D) driver
>> available. Both are open source.
> 
> The nv driver is heavily obfuscated¹ and, perhaps more importantly, it
> lacks some very basic features.  


I didn't know about that "obfuscation" part of nvidia "nv" driver. But 
AKAIK, the "nv" driver is under MIT license.


> Nouveau should solve these problems,
> but it won't make it into sid before the squeeze release.  It also has
> the big problem that, on GeForce 6 and newer, it needs to upload a
> firmware blob into the GPU.  That blob is taken out from the closed
> source driver and probably undistributable, although Nvidia has promised
> not to take legal action.

Didn't know that either. 

It seems we have not many real choices, then :-(

Looking at Wikipedia:

Graphics hardware and FOSS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_and_FOSS

Strictly speaking, only Intel has some chipsets which use open source 
drivers, but the handicap of these are:

1/ Very poor 3D capabilities and overall performance.

2/ If the Intel driver -for whatever reason- does not work, we are stuck 
with a blank/black screen as we (we = linux users) have no other driver 
available for these chipsets.

And what frightens me is the fact that, being Intel drivers fully open, 
there are still such problems with theirs embedded vga chipsets.

 
>>> The best bet is probably
>>> to use Intel graphics, *except* GMA500¹.
>>
>> IIRC, some Intel cards were having *very* ugly problems with xorg (EXA/
>> UXA issue) not so long ago...
> 
> Yes, but with kernels >= 2.6.30.5 and xserver-xorg-video-intel >= 2.8
> these problems should be gone.  I am very happy with the Intel graphics
> on my laptop now.


Lenny uses 2.6.26 kernel line >:-)

But well, let's hope Intel is doing well its homework.

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón


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