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i never considered petitions to corporations to be effective. i'm happy to be wrong.

Watch this space

Depending on your viewpoint, one of my "major advantages" to the BSD system may be a disadvantage to you. And it wouldn't translate well to Linux.

If you get FreeBSD 4.7, it is exactly the same as anybody else's FreeBSD 4.7 in terms of included software. There's no RedHat FreeBSD, SuSE FreeBSD, Debian FreeBSD, etc. It's just FreeBSD.

Now if only they could get that NVidia driver working, it would be perfect.

Funny, you've been asked twice now and declined to provide links.

Here's mine:

FreeBSD Driver Initative
Announcement of collaboration between NVIDIA, SGI, and VA Linux
NVIDIA press release
And another release
Tom's Hardware discussion

Oh, and SGI isn't the only proprietary code either. There's also a cross licensing agreement with S3 for the S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) algorithms that NVIDIA doesn't have the right to disclose.

NVIDIA and SGI drop lawsuits

Stolen from Slashdot:
Try here: http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/

NVIDIA uses the same codebase for ther Windows, Mac OS ?, and Linux drivers. This same codebase will also be used for their FreeBSD drivers to come. Their unified driver architecture ensures that every platform the card runs on gets the latest version of the code and can take advantage of each card's features. So this is definitely a few notches above ATI who won't even produce drivers for my platform, let alone release full specifications to the public to write them.

As for the complaint that NVIDIA is no better than ATI because of a binary driver release: that is not NVIDIA's fault. NVIDIA tries to make as much of their driver open source as possible (which is kind of a necessity because of the plethora of kernel configurations out there). However, the closed-source portions are kept closed because of SGI's patents on OpenGL. Assign blame where blame is due, please.

And if you look at the download page you'll see that it hasn't been updated since December of last year. Maybe development is continuing, but 3D support is still not available (as compared to 3D support for Radeon cards under FreeBSD).

Dinivin

When was it that you last checked? The last update was two weeks ago.

go to this site:
http://nvidia.netexplorer.org
They are working on nvidia drivers, and there is also a petition there that goes to Nvidia, to get them to hurry up and help with the project!
FreeBSD is getting there......

The guys at the Nvidia petition keep track of a few guys trying to port the drivers to FreeBSD. Unfortunately there haven't been many updates lately and I got tired of waiting and installed Linux till the drivers are ready. Too much fiddling in order to get a Voodoo 5 to work.

IIRC, they *CAN'T* open their driver source for licensing reasons. I believe the NVIDIA drivers borrow (read license) code from SGI for their OpenGL support, and it is against the SGI license for NVIDIA to opensource the drivers.

Hence the reason why we have some nice binary drivers, but no source code to go with it. Have a look at the FreeBSD NVIDIA driver initiative FAQ page for more information regarding this matter.

As far as XFree is concerned:

I remember runnning XFree4.x.x several years ago
on FreeBSD. It is entirely possible that this
came from ports(I honestly don't remember) but it
has been there for a while even if it wasn't part
of the base system.

As far as nVidia Xfree drivers are concerned:

This was actually one of the reasons that I
switched my desktop OS from FreeBSD to Linux
a while ago. The only other reason being Java
support. However, the nVidia situation was only a
problem since I needed to be able to do hardware
accelerated GL. If you don't need this, then the
drivers provided by Xfree86 work fine under FreeBSD.
If you do need this then it will most
likely be available in the not so distant future.
I would expect it to be in FreeBSD 5.0. You can
track the work being done and try the latest drivers
by checking out this link.

I know BSD can run many Linux binaries, but what about kernel modules?

At least for nVidia, it is being worked on: FreeBSD NVIDIA Driver Initiative