Hetz: thanks for the info. As for the version of the driver, it may be
stable for you, but I'm not sure it would be stable for me. So I'll ask
at the forums, IRC channel, etc.
The rest of the crowd: the Nvidia card came prepackaged with the computer,
and I can't talk my father into replacing without a good enough reason.
(he uses Windows there most of the time). So, switching to ATI is not an
option.
The reason I believe the current situation with Nvidia cards is
sub-optimal is because:
1. I need to explictly download and build it whenever I upgrade the kernel
(and possibly X as well). Mandrake does not ship it with their distro so
they won't taint their distribution with a proprietary binary-only driver.
2. It cannot be made part of the kernel because of its nature, so
upgrading a kernel is always a two step process.
3. It causes some problems. Like this one, or one on my previous computer
where the X server completely freezed occasionally while the computer was
working. Why should it? A Linux machine should work flawlessly
4. It "taints" the kernel and possibly make isolating problems a two-part
process (removing the driver and then testing the untainted kernel).
So, Nvidia Corp. has done a nice gesture to the i386 Linux users, but
hasn't done enough. Linux "compatibility" is not enough. You still have to
play by the rules of open-source.
At the moment I don't have much time to try and reverse-engineer the
driver. (and I'm not sure what's the legal status of it). Even so, without
the SPEC, the re-created driver can still suffer from the same problems.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Writing a BitKeeper replacement is probably easier at this point than getting
its license changed.
Matt Mackall on OFTC.net #offtopic.
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