3D Support for NVIDIA

[Ian Malone]

Sudheer Satyanarayana wrote:

> Fedora or any other GNU/Linux distro cannot support your hardware out of 
> the box. You will need to install proprietary NVIDIA drivers to get your 
> video adapter working. If you want to know how, try searching for the 
> step by steps instructions on Google, for one. Here's a sample link
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=install+nvidia+driver+on+fedora+8&btnG=Search&meta= 
> 
> 
> If you prefer to expect Fedora to work on the fly buy hardware that are 
> free software friendly. You may also request your hardware vendor to 
> provide exact specifications so that people can write free software 
> drivers for it. Choose what you want.

While this is what I did with the last machine I bought (and I
avoided potentially difficult hardware such as nvidia because I
didn't want to have to mess about with it), this is a very limiting
thing to do when it comes to graphics.  Many higher-end laptops
come with onboard ATI or Nvida chipsets; I found graphics support
ruled out about half my options.  In fact the only OSS vendor with
3D graphics support I know of is Intel and you can't get graphics
cards with Intel chipsets; you must change the motherboard if you
want to upgrade and they use shared RAM.

It is also usually inaccurate to say Fedora can't support NVidia
out of the box.  What it can't do without the proprietary drivers
is hardware acceleration (I notice here certain 2D things are
slower with the nv rather than nvidia module).

-- 
imalone