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The kororaa project made a live-cd with linux, x11 and proprietary drivers for video cards from nvidia and ati. They stopped distributing it because som kernel devs claimed it was a violation of the GPL to distribute GPL software and GPL-incompatible software on the same media. That sounds like what you were planning on. Also, i think that you are not allowed to link statically to GPL'd code, not sure about LGPL either. You can link dynamically to LGPL though. see http://kororaa.org/static.php?page=gpl

They should be for all Intel cards, and packaged together with X.org. As a point of reference, more than a year ago (when XGL was new), I tried out the Korrora Livecd on my friend's laptop with an Intel 855GM (or maybe 852GM, I don't remember now), and it ran all the fancy 3D effects quite well.

You could also check the Ubuntu forums, you might be hitting a problem similar to this.

We received an email from a kernel developer insisting that we cease distributing the livecd with these drivers as he claimed they were a violation of the Linux kernel GPL license.

I currently carry around with me:
Kororaa XGL live CD v0.3 and 0.2
There is nothing better than to show off the power of Linux to your friends and the non believers. 0.3 is only ATI cards at the moment, while 0.2 supports both. People are usually impressed by this.

Backtrack 1.0
The best in security analysis live cd's.

Damn Small Linux
Good for older machines :)

Offline NT Password and Registry Editor
Always good to have when people forget their admin password or something on a windows machine...

Auditor Security collection from the backtrack people. I still have this around because it supports a bit more hardware than backtrack did

Knoppix
Good when you are at public terminals and are kinda paranoid...

I also carry around various install cd's for recent versions of linux.

To be honest, the main reasons I like Gentoo are because it's relatively free from political hassles (you want easy NVidia XOrg drivers? MP3 playback? Win32 Codecs? Go nuts!)

Can I have a distro that's as easy to install as Ubuntu, but uses Portage and standard Linux config files and doesn't give me political hassles? That would be nice.

http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/09/06/vistas-ui-is-b etter-than-this/

The Kororaa Project http://kororaa.org/ had a live cd that had the Nvidia drivers included that had all this in it. It was amazing. They were forced to remove the distro though because of the GPL license.

I've been watching the kororaa project for a while, ever since we did one tandem session with XGL and OS X on two machines, watching XGL rule - especially in the video across cube faces demo. But a few weeks later, the developer announced that he's stopping Kororaa because of GPL issues with properietary drivers. And here's a reply by the FSF.

Now, the point to note here is that GPL is redistribution license. The way the nVidia folks handle it is to give the user some code, a binary blob and effectively tell them to build it themselves. The code they distribute does not link to the Linux kernel *yet*, while the binary blob is the closed source bit. Now, what the user does is to link them all up and there you go - which is not the distributor's fault. And this works because they are not redistributing any code that is copyrighted by a Linux kernel author (for example laf0rge).

The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle, while the distributor (i.e nVidia) is in the gray area of legality. This is of course, my understanding from following up all this (and then had an argument with a paralegal @ work about GPL).

But I could be wrong you know ...

I've been watching the kororaa project for a while, ever since we did one tandem session with XGL and OS X on two machines, watching XGL rule - especially in the video across cube faces demo. But a few weeks later, the developer announced that he's stopping Kororaa because of GPL issues with properietary drivers. And here's a reply by the FSF.

Now, the point to note here is that GPL is redistribution license. The way the nVidia folks handle it is to give the user some code, a binary blob and effectively tell them to build it themselves. The code they distribute does not link to the Linux kernel *yet*, while the binary blob is the closed source bit. Now, what the user does is to link them all up and there you go - which is not the distributor's fault. And this works because they are not redistributing any code that is copyrighted by a Linux kernel author (for example laf0rge).

The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle, while the distributor (i.e nVidia) is in the gray area of legality. This is of course, my understanding from following up all this (and then had an argument with a paralegal @ work about GPL).

But I could be wrong you know ...

The nv drivers are the open-source reverse engineered ones that come with Xorg. They don't have access to most of the specs of the cards, and have to do 3D in software. Basically, they're bearable for 2D work, but since Nvidia don't disclose most of the info needed to write proper drivers (NDA's and all that) the only choice for high-speed use is still the binary closed source nvidia driver.

There are questions over whether the GPL prevents the distribution of the closed-source binary driver precompiled for use with a particular distro's kernel; which is why most distro's have now switched to the GPL Xorg nv driver by default, and let you 'taint' the kernel with the binary driver yourself if you wish, which is definitely legal. For the ramifications of this sorry state of affairs - where convenience butts heads with principles - see what happened to koraa

The situation is very similar for ATI cards.

The main point I want to raise is that we do want to comply, honour and respect the GPL in relation to the Kororaa Project. Currently I am in limbo because no-one seems to be able to confirm the accusations made in the email.

If we are indeed in violation then on behalf of the Kororaa Project I sincerely apologise to the entire open source world, and will cease distribution of the Xgl Live CD immediately.

Is anyone out there able to shed some ground breaking light on this issue?

Although the Xgl Live CD has been halted, we are still working on the next official Kororaa release, 2006. Thank you all for your support.

Linux development tools don't hold up to VC/DirectX yet.

So if it really matters that much (you aren't just making a completely new engine), how hard is it to just, say, mod Quake 4?

you'd have to ship with soooo many drivers for good performance (a boot disk that works well on all systems doesn't use the advanced 3d features of cards that games would need).

Oh noes! That would be soooo hard! In fact, no one's probably ever done it before!

Yes, I know that second project is closed. The reason has nothing to do with drivers. Booting an entire OS to play a single game takes too damned long, even if it boots right into the game. Even then, it's just entirely too easy to pirate a game distributed that way, unless they add some proprietary modules and make sure the game requires a dual-layer DVD. It's difficult or impossible to save, unless you have a way of saving online, which is why they used America's Army. And especially if you're doing that, or an MMO, you'll have to patch the game sooner or later, not to mention the rest of the OS -- this is where drivers matter -- unless you burn a whole new DVD.

It could be done, but it would be extremely difficult, both for you and for the end-user, unless you require a Windows partition on which to save the game (making the bootability pointless) or require the end-user to answer the same stupid questions every time they boot the CD. Only other thing I can think of is configuring the CD before you burn it to know where to look on your hard drive for savegames and patches, but that makes it too easy to pirate, if you let them burn their own CDs. But if you did that, you'd have something like the Xbox 360, where you can patch games that are running off the DVD with something like unionfs and a hard drive -- thus, files which exist on the hard drive are used instead, files which don't are pulled from the CD.

Another possibility would be to skip the CD altogether, and just install another OS to their hard drive. But you still have portability and annoyance issues -- if I already have Linux, why can't I just run it without rebooting? If I have Windows, why should I have to install Linux (even without partitioning) and reboot just to play a damned game?

But really, drivers are such a small problem for most people trying to run Linux that it's not worth mentioning. Development tools aren't the issue either. The real issue is, no one seems to care.

I can't wait to see Vista's Aero engine and XGL collide on the next revision of the map. It was amazing to see how smoothly the Kororaa XGL Live cd worked on a pentium 3 with a gforce 4 card, while nobody ever would expect Aero to be anywhere near usable on my best computer, an athlon xp 2100+ with a radeon 9700 pro and 512 mb of ram.

> That's a bitch to get acceleration working in some, if not all, Linux distributions.

All ATi chips before and including the r250 (ranging from the RADEON 7000 to the RADEON 9250) have open source drivers bundled with Xorg and the Linux kernel. All other ATi chips can be used with the binary drivers from ATi. The thinkpads I know have RADEON MOBILITY 7500 chips, so they are perfectly supported.

> On the other hand, I run Debian on my T30, no acceleration on the video at all. It used to be working just fine, but somewhere along the way it stopped working and I never noticed it.

Maybe this is the right time to switch to Gentoo. ;-) And no, this is not a question of fanboyism, I'd just hard-guess (because I didn't bother to actually check) that Debian, Ubunto, and other dpkg/rpm based distributions are suffering from the same problem as the Kororaa Live CD: distributing precompiled binaries of the kernel modules required to load the ATi and nVidia drivers violates the GPL (a similar problem happened with the old Sun Java license which those distributions weren't allowed to support because they couldn't redistribute the software). On Gentoo the installation scripts and patches are completely independent from the distfiles thus allowing developers to provide portage support for software without redistributing it.

The Kororaa distro has been taken offline? How come I can still download it at http://kororaa.org/static.php?page=static060318-18 1203? Skip the melodrama - some arsehole sent a self-rightious email to the maintainer and everyone simultaniously said "wow, what a fuckwit". Noone knows whether the nVidia drivers are against the GPL but someone has to actually sue them to find out - do you really see that happening?

Have a ball.

Get kororaa live-cd and see for yourself, one desktop experience tells more than thousand screenshots.
http://kororaa.org/

Then you should try ubuntu...

The best advocacy results I've ever seen was this week, when we at the office demoed the Kororaa Xgl Live CD to the Windows people. I have never seen so many people so impressed in such a short time. And by such seemingly useless (but just plain cool) features as wobbling windows, 3D virtual desktops, and what not. The word spread quite quickly and people from all over the office came in to see the magic and get copies of the CD. :-)

I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow. My guess is that the video card's hardware acceleration is not used.

I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow. My guess is that the video card's hardware acceleration is not used.