It seems that ATI video cards will not work in gNewSense at the moment, even with the recently freed GLX code. The reason is that the ATI drivers are not in gNewSense. Apparently, the free ATI drivers are not free. :-P
I think I'll stick with my RADEON X850 for now, even though I don't have 3D graphics, instead of buying a new motherboard to get Intel integrated 3D graphics. In December 2008, AMD released the 3D code for their newest video cards, so maybe something will become of that soon. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_oss_3d&num=1 Here is the detailed information I found. I will post it here so other people don't go crazy trying to figure out what's wrong, like I did. ;-) Here is a thread from the gNewSense forums about the ATI drivers. Please see the post by kdean06. http://wiki.gnewsense.org/ForumMain/ATIDrivers He also made a similar comment on another message board. http://www.nuxified.org/topic/gnewsense#comment-8794 Here are the bugs related to the non-free section of the ATI driver. http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00186 http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00140 The offending file is "radeon_cp.c". Here is a copy of it. (it might be an older version) https://svn.mcs.anl.gov/repos/ZeptoOS/tests/linux-2.6.19.2svn/drivers/char/drm/radeon_cp.c As you can see, under the comment "CP microcode (from ATI)", there is a big blob of binary code that is used by the driver. You can read about what the people at Debian think about it. It is specifically mentioned on this page. http://wiki.debian.org/KernelFirmwareLicensing I don't know if there is any work going on to replace the offending code. My guess would be no. Dave _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
