nVidia RIVA TNT - any success story?ll

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenny Speer" <kenny.speer at comcast.net>
To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases"
<fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2004 11:19 PM
Subject: Re: nVidia RIVA TNT - any success story?ll


> If you have an NVidia card you should use the drivers from NVidia.  They
> are very good at providing linux drivers for their cards (unlike ATI).
> They have always worked great for me.  Go to their website and download
> the drivers. If you need to, just use Vesa until you get the correct
> drivers.  They will almost surely be better than the ones that ship with
>    either XFree or the kernel.

Umm. The NVidia drivers are not full drivers. They are non-GPL kernel
modules which provide the hooks to run their modified version of the OpenGL
libraries, and they replace your OpenGL libraries without recording the
change in your RPM package management. This means several things:

    1: You can't debug or improve their drivers.
    2: You can't distribute their kernel drivers as part of a GPL package,
which makes it hard to sell the OS as a package with the drivers installted.
    3: You can't integrate it into the Xconfigurator or other such tools,
you have to edit your XF86Config or Xorg.conf files by hand.
    4: If you update your OpenGL libraries, you have to first un-install and
then after updating re-install the NVidia drivers.
    5: If you update your kernel, you'll have to ercompile the NVidia kernel
modules by hand.

Etc., etc., etc. This is not "very good at providing Linux drivers", this is
"giving a teensy-weensy acknowledgement of a growing market".