radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.
Gene Heskett
gene.heskett at verizon.net
Mon Feb 1 23:35:03 UTC 2010
On Monday 01 February 2010, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
>On Monday 01 February 2010 20:11:46 Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Marko Vojinovic wrote:
>> > And the fact that they provide support next to none (of their closed
>> > source drivers) demonstrates that they *do* care about Linux market,
>> > and do take the community support seriously.
>>
>> I disagree. Providing proprietary drivers is NOT providing support to
>> Free Software or GNU/Linux.
>
>Of course not. It is providing support for their hardware. And they do a
> very good job at it.
>
>The fact they don't support the Free Software might be their own choice, in
>the end. And this is completely legitimate standpoint for a hardware
>manufacturer. They are just protecting their technology secrets. I see
> nothing wrong with that, as long as they provide support.
>
>Unlike ATI, who *claim* to support FS, but actually do so only when the
>hardware in question becomes obsolete.
>
And in my experience, by the time we have decent ATI FS drivers (and even
that is for selected cards at first, usually missing the price leaders for at
least another year) the nVidia card has either died completely, or nVidia has
disco'd the drivers for it in the name of the march of progress. The radeon
driver, while not an indy car or bonneville speed demon, is working quite
well and stable (more than I can say about the radeonhd driver which goes
randomly into uncontrolled fits of screen blanking) for me now on an rv610
card called the Diamond HD2400 Pro. But, its well out of the supply
pipelines, so now that the FS driver is stable, rotsa ruck finding one of
them to buy.
My main bitch is that it has an audio system in the chip that isn't even
bonded out to a connector, but if I enable pulseaudio, it chooses that for
the main output, cannot be convinced to ignore it, and my machine is then
silent. And yet another voice is heard screaming how do I get rid of PA.
Sending L.P. messages about that get no _useful_ response, its as if he
doesn't understand why there might be more than one audio facility in a
machine, when in fact this one has 3, one on the video card thats a
/dev/null, the motherboard kit that sounds like the $1.50 it cost ASUS to put
it on this board, and an Audigy2 Live(SBO-400), a pretty decent 24 bit stereo
only card.
My choice of video cards is somewhat determined by the fact that ATI has at
least thrown some docs over the fence, albeit often old, giving folks like
Alex a leg up on writing FS drivers. Having gone to the nvidia forum looking
for help, a linux user always seems to get his answers filtered through a
lawyer to make absolutely sure that no information that might actually be
helpful gets forwarded back to the hapless user. With all due respect for
the brains at nVidia, screw that, you put your pants on one leg at a time
just like I do.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Last time I had intimate contact with another human being was rather a
painful experience... I rather liked it... ;)
-- Brett Manz
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