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For example you can read an Ubuntu/Mandriva/Fedora comparison. You can find other benchmarks by scouring the Phoronix articles page. I have a feeling the result is usually a wash with no distro coming out on top on all tests though...

It's a problem, but I'm not sure it's a technical one. Even though AACS is trivially broken by AnyDVD, Cyberlink probably doesn't get a HD license for Linux because of piracy BS. They do sell a regular DVD player in the Ubuntu Store if you didn't know. On the open source side there's some progress going on, but it's slow work and to be honest I don't think there are that many Linux PCs with a Blu-Ray drive. But there are interesting developments going on, hardware acceleration is coming soon to ATI cards. If we want to talk multimedia, I'd much rather get rid of flash.

8.10 won't support joysticks, because of yet another bug in Xorg. http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?p=49721 But hey, we don't need that feature! We should just buy consoles anyways, because PCs aren't for gaming! Right? Guys?

Actually I have heard the latest drivers are actually pretty good
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_rhd3300_790&num=1.
And the FOSS drivers are making a lot of progress.

Thanks for the reply. Like I said, I really didn't look to far into things. I'll try a little harder.

Alright, from what I could tell, all of the Dell laptops include Vista which no choice for XP except for the 9 inch which included only Ubuntu. I understand you wanting to compare XP to Linux because you like the battery life, but it's a weird comparison because you're comparing ~6-year-old or so to modern. Newer OSes tend to require higher system requirements. You might as well as be comparing Windows XP to Windows Vista (which many people do! :-)). Strangely enough, it is apparently possible for Vista to get better battery performance than XP if Aero is turned completely off.

The Vista comparison on this page was interesting in that depending on the machine and usage, the results differed. It looks like Linux is in general beginning to snake ahead when idle. But when doing things it loses. There was also a link showing Fedora 8 barely beating XP when idle.

Having said all of that, I didn't say that Linux gets better battery performance than XP in real life performance. Given that OEM Windows tends to be specially configured for smart power usage on the laptops they are installed on, I wonder if the same thing will happen to OEM linux?

Kernel modesetting is kinda here for Intel and ATI graphics cards (in Fedora) but it's still stabilizing.

So the answer to your first question is: soon you will be able to set the final video mode in the kernel. As for your second question, doing it in X is not the best solution (as doing it in the kernel means less flickering when X starts, the ability to support graphical kernel panics and nicer virtual terminal switching).

I refer you to the Asus ExpressGate technology - an embedded linux system on their newer mobos.

If you really want to know why is it bad to have closed source drivers, check Nvidia's and ATI's linux driver forums. Example1, example2, example3.
Closed source development, compared to the open source one, sucks the monkey's ass.
ATI released the specs, at least partially, and this is the result. That's why I didn't buy Nvidia.
I'm currencly using the binary driver from ATI, while waiting for the open source radeonhd to be completed.

Here is some info on the latest ATI drivers.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_evolution&num=1
I do believe that they are offering a unified driver now so some older cards are supported by this driver.
And this has some info on the FOSS drivers that are being written with ATIs documentation and help
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_r500_gaming&num=1

So I would suggest that you check it out. But as you can see ATI has been making a lot of effort to support Linux both with Binary drivers and by releasing the docs and specs for their video cards.

Here is some info on the latest ATI drivers.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_evolution&num=1
I do believe that they are offering a unified driver now so some older cards are supported by this driver.
And this has some info on the FOSS drivers that are being written with ATIs documentation and help
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_r500_gaming&num=1

So I would suggest that you check it out. But as you can see ATI has been making a lot of effort to support Linux both with Binary drivers and by releasing the docs and specs for their video cards.

If you could use google or try it out yourself, you would see that the proprietary nvidia drivers are the only ones with which everything (this means desktop effects and google earth) works.

Not correct.

(1) Proprietary Nvidia Linux drivers do not support 3D compositing desktop (compiz et al) for "legacy" Nvidia cards.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html

(2) Proprietary Nvidia Linux drivers do not support KDE 4 ... they have very poor performance.

(3) ATI's fglrx proprietary driver for Linux is entirely similar ... but it does at least support KDE 4.

(4) There are two open-source ATI drivers for Linux: xf86-video-ati (aka radeon) and radeonhd

See this site:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7032

In terms of differences between the drivers, here's one way to look at them. Others may jump in and disagree.

  - fglrx has the most features and capabilities, and runs most games quite a bit faster than the open source drivers. Downside is that it is closed source and when there is a problem you often have to wait for the next release or more.

  - radeonhd is the most polished on 5xx/6xx and has the most resources working on end user issues. Downside is that it is display/modesetting only, although on a modern system you can still get some pretty nice performance without acceleration.

  - radeon has immediate access to all the code and experience from previous ATI chip generations, including 2d, 3d and video acceleration. On 5xx/6xx it is primarily display/modesetting as well, however 2d acceleration is running on 5xx today.

My own card is an ATI HD 2400 Pro ... which uses a R610 GPU. Sadly, this is one of the least well supported by the open source ATI drivers, but it works fine in Linux using the fglrx closed-source driver.

I am however expecting this GPU to be supported by radeonhd driver for full 3D performance by perhaps the end of the year, with luck:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_soon&num=1

If you could use google or try it out yourself, you would see that the proprietary nvidia drivers are the only ones with which everything (this means desktop effects and google earth) works.

Not correct.

(1) Proprietary Nvidia Linux drivers do not support 3D compositing desktop (compiz et al) for "legacy" Nvidia cards.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html

(2) Proprietary Nvidia Linux drivers do not support KDE 4 ... they have very poor performance.

(3) ATI's fglrx proprietary driver for Linux is entirely similar ... but it does at least support KDE 4.

(4) There are two open-source ATI drivers for Linux: xf86-video-ati (aka radeon) and radeonhd

See this site:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7032

In terms of differences between the drivers, here's one way to look at them. Others may jump in and disagree.

  - fglrx has the most features and capabilities, and runs most games quite a bit faster than the open source drivers. Downside is that it is closed source and when there is a problem you often have to wait for the next release or more.

  - radeonhd is the most polished on 5xx/6xx and has the most resources working on end user issues. Downside is that it is display/modesetting only, although on a modern system you can still get some pretty nice performance without acceleration.

  - radeon has immediate access to all the code and experience from previous ATI chip generations, including 2d, 3d and video acceleration. On 5xx/6xx it is primarily display/modesetting as well, however 2d acceleration is running on 5xx today.

My own card is an ATI HD 2400 Pro ... which uses a R610 GPU. Sadly, this is one of the least well supported by the open source ATI drivers, but it works fine in Linux using the fglrx closed-source driver.

I am however expecting this GPU to be supported by radeonhd driver for full 3D performance by perhaps the end of the year, with luck:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_soon&num=1

I call shenanigans. I've been stuck with ATI cards on two different machines; the first, a 9250, stopped being supported by fglrx a while ago.

I call shenanigans.

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2306

Linux Compatibility: ATI Radeon 9250 128MB

ATI Radeon 9250 128MB

Description: AGP 8x, 240MHz core clock, 4 pixel pipelines, 400MHz 128MB 64-bit DDR, OpenGL 1.5
Hardware Notes: Open-Source video drivers available for Linux.

The nVidia drivers are better, but nVidia is less free.

You are seriously out of date. The ATI closed-source drivers for Linux are now better than Nvidia drivers for Linux.

Since AMD bought ATI out they've made a serious effort to get an open source driver for all the recent chips. Including, if I understand correctly, funding work on the radeonhd driver.

Correct.

http://www.phoronix.com/ has the whole story.

The nVidia drivers work, but if you're using a platform like FreeBSD on the amd64, there are no drivers at this point, and it'll be a while.

Not really.

Nvidia drivers, for example, don't work properly with KDE 4.

Hold the phone, Nvidia may have just recently fixed that:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_17768&num=1

If so, that is long overdue.

The nVidia drivers are better, but nVidia is less free.

You are seriously out of date. The ATI closed-source drivers for Linux are now better than Nvidia drivers for Linux.

Since AMD bought ATI out they've made a serious effort to get an open source driver for all the recent chips. Including, if I understand correctly, funding work on the radeonhd driver.

Correct.

http://www.phoronix.com/ has the whole story.

The nVidia drivers work, but if you're using a platform like FreeBSD on the amd64, there are no drivers at this point, and it'll be a while.

Not really.

Nvidia drivers, for example, don't work properly with KDE 4.

Hold the phone, Nvidia may have just recently fixed that:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_17768&num=1

If so, that is long overdue.

zquote>Right now they're crapping their pants because they gambled everything on Vista which is failing spectacularly, whereas both ATi and Intel have got a 2 year head start on supporting Ubuntu out of the box.

Traditionally (before the AMD buyout) ATI has had terrible support under Linux, nVidia has been delivering their binary drivers and they have in my experience been easy to install, stable and fully functional much longer than ATI. By the way, the latest 177.68 drivers should now have fixed the recent KDE4 performance issues. From what I've understood the fglrx (closed source) ATI driver has made considerable progress so maybe now they're equal, but closed vs closed source nVidia got nothing to be ashamed of. For exampel, ATI just this month added CrossFire support while SLI has been supported since 2005, that's more like three years behind than two years ahead.

Of course, ATI is now opening up their specs but it's going slowly. For example, they have not yet recieved the 3D specs on the last generation R600 cards, much less the current generation. And after those specs are released some very non-trivial drivers must be written as well, meaning it could take another few years before we see fully functional open source drivers. Also this strategy is less than a year old, so if they're two years ahead they're moving fast. Nothing of this is something that should make nVidia executives the least bit queasy.

They are crapping their pants because ATI has delivered two kick-ass parts in the 4850 and 4870, and there's very little reason to buy anything else these days. They are crapping their pants because Intel won't give them a Nehalem system bus license. They're crapping their pants because the 800lb gorilla that's Intel is entering a market everyone else has been leaving. They're crapping their pants because the US economy is shaky and people might not spend big $$$ on graphics cards. But over Linux support? Put it into perspective, and you'll see it's an extremely minor issue.

Try again in October, when Ubuntu 8.10 comes out. There have been some major advances in open-source graphics acceleration from AMD, so you might be pleasantly surprised.

Try again in October, when Ubuntu 8.10 comes out. There have been some major advances in open-source graphics acceleration from AMD, so you might be pleasantly surprised.

Yes, and if you are running X and Linux crashes, your machine would just lock up, since your drivers don't implement kernel mode switching. Windows has it much better with the BSOD.

Providing (almost) NVidia-like video card performance combined with (almost) Intel-like openness is one great thing AMD is doing right now. It's too bad that not enough pepole care about the openness to make it matter.

Maybe because if you want to be open, you're running a very expensive unaccelerated card at the moment? Don't get me wrong, it's nice that they release specs and all but as far as I know the full ISA for R5xx came in february and R6xx in june. There's not a single document on R7xx (4850 and 4870) and the only things that do work on those are the basics common to all cards through AtomBIOS. I understand that they're working very hard on it and will get there (plenty detail at Phoronix), but right now you'd have to be buying it because of the open docs and future support rather than the current driver. Don't get me wrong, it is a great thing by AMD but it'd probably be more important to consumers if the open-source driver was on par feature- and performance-wise.

Like another poster pointed out, Phoronix is your source. I agree with you that it is a major oversight that the official fglrx download site does not list support for the HD48xx cards.

And regarding the open source drivers, both the ati and the radeonhd driver have in-tree support for the latest cards. They will probably be released alongside with xorg 7.4 (xserver 1.5), which is still a long way off.

Phoronix is a very Linux oriented news site, which also follows closely various development in both radeon opensource drivers, in geforce nouveau project, and the official binary drivers from ATI and nVidia.

radeonhd.org is a sister site they've put up, which more specifically hold news about both drivers and links to specific ressources.

Every once in a while, they do some benchmarks and thus you can have an idea about how these drivers perform.

4870X2 has already been supported for a week (for 2D only) by both open source drivers, thanks to the Atom-Bios support.
For 3D see what the Mesa developer said a couple of posts above.

The Windows Catalyst and the Linux fglrx share a lot of common code and AMD has pledged to make efforts to keep quality in the Linux drivers.
The HD3000 has seen a very quick support in the closed source drivers. So probably the HD4xx0 will be supported into Linux fast.

Yeah wasn't the UT3 linux client supposed to come out months ago?

Oh, but I did find this on his finger. Ah, finger.

W

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

0x000000 Security. Very snarky and somewhat crazy security blogger. Usually interesting.
Phoronix. Linux + hardware + games = Nothing not to love unless you are lame.
Anandtech. Hardware. Glorious hardware. Make sure to put on the adult diapers before visting.
HowtoForge. How to do stuff. Usually in Linux.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. More fun than a barrel of iMacs.
Signal to Noise. The official 37signals blog. They are pompus, they can be pricks at times, but they usually have interesting things to say.
Scobleizer. Robert Scoble. His job is talking to people using social networking tools who own companies that make social networking tools. At some point there will be a business plan. Just not today.

Probably Phoronix, as they already have the cards and are already testing them, even though the cards have yet to hit stores it seems. They're one of the few groups I've seen really trying to delve into benchmarking hardware and reporting it, and the test suite they've made is a pretty good starting point for doing benchmarks yourself.

Well Phoronix does a lot of Linux hardware benchmarking and reviewing, and said they are working on getting some data up on their site after they've had some time with the 4850 and 4870. Just annoying they can get hardware like that two weeks or so before it's in stores. :P

Phoronix already got the Radeon HD 4850 working with the open-source "Radeon" driver too: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12503

It just looks like they are using the same parts of the EULA for all of their products, search/replace name of the product. Just look at the part of LIMITED WARRANTY. It makes no sense to an OpenSUSE user!

I love OpenSUSE as a distribution, I am a constant user and I cheer for them , but I don't see myself as being the "You" they refer on the EULA. Actually, I don't see any OpenSUSE user being it.

About the "Benchmark Testing", now I see why we never see OpenSUSE under benchmark testings on , say, Phoronix for example.

While the hypervisor may have tucked away the 3D hardware pretty nicely, there may still be hope for some 3D prowess on the PS3 yet. Maybe some of you have heard of Gallium3D, the new driver framework from Tungsten Graphics (of Mesa/DRI/DRI2 fame)?

In any case, in this article on phoronix, and on some other pages I can't re-find, they're talking about a Gallium driver for the PS3, which could probably transparantly use the vector processing units as a dedicated 3D card. I for one, am looking forward to this working out.

Will an article from phoronix.com do? They quote an irc conversation with Luc Verhaegen who started the Unichrome Project, and also quote what Xavier Bachelot, an Openchrome developer, told them in a message. They don't say what kind of message (email, irc, whatever). The article gives a very good overview of why people doubt what Via says until they have code and/or documentation in hand. Part of Xavier's quote is particularly relavent, "I certainly wouldn't want them to claim that they support Linux and FOSS, like they did several times in the past, and don't put their money where their mouth is." I don't know if this most recent release contains any unknown useful material and will reserve judgement until X dev's speak. Please note the phoronix article and quotes are from before this release.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron using the alternative installer allows full disk encryption with a passphrase during the install. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=873&num=1 Debian has had this since Etch I think. Slackware and SUSE also have a good set of docs on how to set up full disk encrytion. Not as easy as Ubuntu or Debian though. Actually it is more a fully encrypted root partition. The /boot needs to unencrypted to function. You can use an integrity checker to ensure this is not tampered with. There is no excuse in 2008 for not using encryption. And use a real operating system. Not Windows!

> Intel can do it. ATI has promised to do it and now so does VIA. Why is NVidia different?

ATI hasn't just promised, they did:

http://ati.amd.com/developer/open_gpu_documentation.html
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=842&num=1

The drivers are provided as source, and usually compiles fine regardless of processor mode. Only a few drivers has been created bone-hard 32-bit.

look at:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7647

AMD/ATI is contributing a lot info today.

It's interesting you should attack nvidia ('s regrettable lack of open source drivers) in a story with a link to phoronix, which noted a rumor January 10 that nvidia might open source their drivers too. Of course, we know what rumors are worth. I for one intend to get a new laptop shortly after the quad cores start rolling out and I plan to get whatever laptop will let me use no closed source drivers. If I can find one. :P

For ages, the FOSS community has said "just give us the specs for your graphics cards and we'll write the drivers". Well it looks like AMD is taking real steps in that direction, and I for one, say Thanks!

According to TFA, the small group at AMD who has spent time clearing the docs for legal issues are going to speak at FOSDEM, and the maintainer for the open source driver for AMD/ATI graphics (RadeonHD) will be giving an update.

And thanks also to Intel for putting out their 3D graphics specs last month. These are good days for Linux.

A GUI for virtualization is already in Hardy, everyone.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=983&num=1

Are you talking about the radeonhd driver?

Currently there's only 2d support, but a handful of developers from Novell seem to be consistently working on it.

As for specs, they just released another batch back in early january.

No.

Splashtop was mentioned a while back on Slashdot (and I'm far too lazy to look it up). This is basically an enhanced version of LinuxBIOS offered in certain Asus motherboards that allows you to do some basic net-appliance style stuff (web, mail, etc) directly from the BIOS without needing to boot an OS off the hard disk. It boots Really Fast as it loads directly from ROM and doesn't need to fark around with all the normal stuff usually necessary to bring an x86 machine live from disk.

Here's a review that goes into more detail, including lots of tasty pictures of using the mobo with no external storage attached.

I don't think you're being fair on AMD. It wasn't too long ago that they announced that they would be releasing documentation for some of their GPUs, and people (understandably) didn't believe them. But then they actually did it a couple of weeks later!

As they came good on their last promise, I'm willing to believe them on this one.

In the end it doesn't really matter whether we believe them or not, though. What matters is whether they end up doing it, and no one should rush to buy their GPUs until they have actually done this.

Hopefully they will also be more commercial-source friendly as well. I've "resorted" to buying XiG's product in the past, because Xorg wasn't working quite right for me... but I (and many others with driver problems) simply don't have that option unless AMD passes the info to commercial vendors such as these as well. Yes, I know FOSS is all that, but when you need things to Just Work, sometimes it's easier to pay the money.

Asus already offers this.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=885&num=1
It does use Linux BTW and the Motherboard is very Linux Friendly.