Could/should the new nvidia driver be added to the release candidate live release ?

[Eelko Berkenpies]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:54:04 +0000, Anne Wilson
<cannewilson at googlemail.com>
wrote:
> On Friday 16 January 2009 00:22:25 Linuxguy123 wrote:
>> On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 00:38 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> > On Thursday 15 January 2009, Linuxguy123 wrote:
>> > > There was a lot of user frustration that prior versions of KDE
didn't
>> > > work properly because of issues attributed to nvidia.  I think its
>> > > our
>> > > responsibility to test/work this out in the release candidate and
>> > > make
>> > > sure that things do work properly now.
>> >
>> > It is not. Proprietary drivers are not supported.
>> >
>> > I don't see why we should put stuff on the live CD which are not part
>> > of
>> > Fedora. We want you to test Fedora, not some proprietary crap.
>>
>> BECAUSE YOUR USERS NEED IT TO FULLY USE KDE !
>>
> No they don't.  Please stop assuming that your preference is a general
> need.
> 
> Anne

And I would like to add to the whole issue (just add, it's not my intention
to throw oil on the fire :)) that a company like nVidia or ATI should pay a
little bit more attention to their legacy drivers (and Linux userbase in
general). I have a fairly new PC at home (not older then 3, 3.5 years)
having a nVidia FX 5500 card (and a FX 5200 at work) and with both
computers I'm having graphics issues within KDE.

The new 180.x drivers are only based on the 6000+ range of the nVidia cards
and they seem to contain the needed fixes for KDE to run (really) smoothly.
And the same for ATI (I have a 9200SE as an alternative at work), they
haven't been updating their legacy drivers since 2006. Hence the fact that
they don't even supports resolutions over 1280x1024.

By Google-ing, you'll easily find out that there are quite a few people out
there having these problems and they haven't been solved since they were
initially reported. The only one making a little bit of progress was nVidia
back in the first quarter of 2008 by releasing an updated 173.14.x driver
solving a few of the problems for me.

Therefor I have to agree with Kevin on this one. Doing a specific
(Fedora)KDE release for a wouldn't work (for me at least), there still
would be certain problems until the manufacturer decides to fix their
drivers. In general KDE is running smoothly, keeping the driver
restrictions and issues in mind, and I don't see the need of having card
specific distro's.

Just my € 0.02... :)

-- 
Eelko Berkenpies
http://www.berkenpies.nl/