RC3 Install Report

[Antonio Olivares]

> Unfortunately the folks making those decisions are
> more concerned with the 
> > religious issue of free open source than "works for
> most people." They are 
> > unlikely to ever make it easy to install the vendor
> drivers. and frequently 
> > claim capabilities for the kernel drivers which in
> practice are only present for 
> > recent top of the line 3D hardware.
> >   
> 
> I cringe whenever I hear people describe free software as
> religious
> issue.  Religion is based on blind belief and
> dogma.  

Religion is based on other things that do not make sense to talk about here.  It is a thing that has been passed from generation to generation, and then someone breaks the cycle and goes into another religion.  In such related matters, users convert "Religion", change from Fedora to Ubuntu, or other "Religion"?  Maybe Ubuntu Christian Edition/Ubuntu Muslim Edition/...., but that is beyon the scope of this mailing list :(  

> Free software is a
> set of principles and open source is a development
> methodology.  In the
> case of non-free drivers,  even ignoring the
> principles and the benefits
> of the development methodology, there is the simple matter
> of support. 
> Fedora has the expertise necessary to fix issues in Xorg
> drivers but the
> non-free drivers are completely unsupportable by Fedora
> since the source
> is closed.  While making it easy might seem a benefit
> in the shorter
> run,  it is unsustainable in the longer run. 
> Newer kernel revisions
> will often break the non-free drivers in ways we cannot do
> anything
> about and instead of leading users to believe it is a
> supportable
> option,  we maintain a distance over them. 
> Setting aside all this, 
> these drivers are in a legal gray area and enabling support
> increases
> the liability for any distribution.
> 
> We don't hide the fact that Fedora does not and will not
> support
> proprietary drivers or spend anytime making it easier to
> install.  If
> you disagree with that principle, ther are other
> distributions to choose
> from. 
> 
> -- 

I also like to watch spirited discussions like these and other related issues.  I also follow other distros too!  I like Fedora, and thus comply and test out nouveau, but at the same time am somewhat dissapointed in that I ask for help on how to compile nouveau on a kernel from kernel.org and not a Fedora kernel.  The fedora kernels have dracut and do this automagically and I try to copy the same kernel configuration to build new kernel, it builds and installs, I reboot, I log into level 3 then startx and X fails to load :(, I want to use the nouveau but they(kernel guys/nouvveau guys make it to cryptic, YES, i read the howto/wiki page, it does me no good).  So here, I have to agree with Bill, in using Fedora 10 I had no choice but use Nvidia drivers and I successfully loaded the "evil" drivers.  I am content running nouveau now with Fedora 12 but only fedora kernels, I want to compile/roll my own kernels too, but the documentation is lacking for
 nouveau.  Please make it easier for end users to use it, making hard and cryptic leaves many no choice but to blacklist nouveau and use the "evil, properietary" drivers from Nvidia. 

Also, while on this issue, 
they, *kernel developers*, have stated many times that they were not going to allow evil properietary drivers from running by supposedly blocking them, but the only thing they do is say ok you are on your own, you are running a "tainted" kernel and the firmware that you have or load is also "evil" and you are not LIBRE 

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/tainted
1

What else is there to do?
I want to follow development, at school I do, running Rawhide and am happily running it, two other machines running soon to be Fedora 13, but one of the rawhide machines does not boot a kernel newer than 2.6.34-rc4????, this same machine also does not load Slackware 13.1 RC1, problem with kernel/Xorg driver?  So it is not all Fedora's fault.  

What can I do?  I have filed a bug report, it has been ignored or not given any chance.  Maybe after Fedora 13 is released then it will get attention?
I will try a fedora 13 live spin on it and see if it gets into X at least so it would not be a show stopper again :(

Thank you for listening.  I'll give you bug report numbers if you need them.

Sorry for adding to the noise :(

Antonio