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

[Ben Boeckel]

Linuxguy123 wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 09:55 +0100, Eelko Berkenpies wrote:
>> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:54:04 +0000, Anne Wilson
>> 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.
> 
> I think KDE has painted itself into a corner on this issue.  I bet half
> the computers out there aren't going to run KDE properly.
They haven't. Only people who think they need a blob to run it think that. 
KDE works fine on drivers which do not provide any hardware acceleration. 
The problem is in nVidia 1) not supporting older hardware and 2) forcing 
themselves to be the only ones who can fix the problem. KDE does not live 
or die based on that. KDE has no fault in implementing features that nVidia 
is not willing to support on older hardware.

As for half, you're blowing things out of proportion and I'd be willing to 
take that bet. Cards which are worse than this (mobile card) are either 
unsupported anymore by the blob, so using nv is the only long-term solution 
and the blob may not be able to get performance for it in any case. If 
you're SoL with older cards, just turn them off. You have an old computer, 
not everything can work on any hardware. Newer than this, still use nv; 
it'll perform well enough to handle DE (except for maybe some eye candy, 
but that's a waste even with the blob IMO).

> Just to clarify, it wouldn't be a card specific release.  It would be a
> release that has drivers for nVidia cards in addition to whatever it had
> before.
When the blob is installed, it mangles the Xorg.conf file for itself. As does 
the ATI one (AFAIK, never actually had an ATI card). Even if it doesn't, 
does it ship the mangled one or the default one?

--Ben