[sclug] sclug Digest, Vol 61, Issue 14

[Dickon Hood]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 14:10:51 +0000, Neil Haughton wrote:

: Shouldn't Canonical make their OS work with existing drivers, rather than
: insist that others keep up with them? I mean, the damn thing works perfectly
: well with 7.10 and 8.04, so why should they deliberately break it with 8.10
: - and then implicitly blame nvidia for not keeping up with them? And whilst
: we are on the subject, why *should *nvidia rewrite drivers for older
: hardware simply because Canonical have broken things?

They shouldn't.  Had their driver been Free, they wouldn't have to,
either.

: I think that what
: annoys me most is that  if M$ did this (and they do from time to time)  the
: ponytails would be up in arms sticking their tongues out from the rooftops,
: whereas because it is *Canonical *we are all supposed have a warm gooey
: feeling about it.

As a ponytail, I disagree.  And as for Canonical, I don't feel warm and
gooey about them at all: they give remarkably little back to their
upstreams.

: Personally I think this whole 'proprietary is evil' thing is childish. Does
: anyone refuse to buy a Toyota (say) because they won't give you a copy of
: the manufacturing drawings?  (The answer is no, by the way :-) ).

No, but neither do I refuse to buy a computer because the PCB schematics
aren't available.

: Nvidia
: produce a driver (yay!), it works (yay!)

Barely (boot with vga=65534, into X, then switch back to a text console,
for example).

: but you can't see inside it (OMG!)

Big problem.

: so we mustn't use it!

Ideally not, no.

: FGS who cares if you can't see inside it?

You, for one.  If we could see inside it, this issue would simply not have
occured: the driver would have been updated along with the X server.

: And now I'm going to calm down over lunch,  whilst I look for an alternative
: successor to Ubuntu 7.10

Debian.

FWIW, I have a brace of nVidia 6600s in this machine, operating with
nVidia's kernel mess, as neither the nv nor the Nouveau drivers work
properly with my system (64-bit, fine, but two distinct cards driving two
monitors with one display (:0.0) using Xinerama (which is evil, but
works).  Nouveau say it might be possible with XRandR 13 or 14,
depending).

-- 
Dickon Hood

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