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Accelerated nVidia Drivers for FreeBSD

Posted by michael on from the bring-out-all-the-freebsd-games dept.

zero0w writes "nVidia has released the official OpenGL accelerated driver set for FreeBSD 4.7 STABLE. Check out the nVidia Driver page for more detail. According to the page, this release should be considered as initial beta. So don't count on it to build a day-to-day production system, yet."

4 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD != Linux by OrangeSpyderMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The nvidia page is fairly annoying on this point - the direct link to the drivers is under a subtitle "For Linux Users", and on the installation instructions we can read, "Please note that the NVIDIA driver set requires XFree version 4.2 or greater. If this is not available on your linux distribution,"

    A shame to muddy a laudible effort such as BSD drivers with a couple of dumb (lazy?) errors. I can appreciate that much of the info may be common to both, but to explicitly ignore the fundamental differences is a bit of a shame.

    --
    Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
    1. Re:FreeBSD != Linux by be-fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Look, FreeBSD support isn't a huge deal at NVIDIA. It's a few coders in their driver development group that are doing this with company approval. No doubt, these pages didn't go through the official "gods of marketing" over at NVIDIA. As such, give it a little time. What most likely happened was that they were pressed for time in releasing these drivers, and so they just made some hastly pages to put it up. What matters is the actual code, and once that's working nicely, I'm sure the page will get polished.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  2. Re:Source code... nVidia... by Darren+Winsper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not exactly. Their kernel module contains a very large binary and some code to act as an interface between the kernel and the big binary file. This allows them to keep the source closed while allowing people to compile it for newer kernels as they come out.

  3. Re:Why by daoine_sidhe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have been a linux user for 3 years, and I decided to try FreeBSD 4.7. I found it much quicker and more stable; kernel compilation was ridiculously easy and fast, and accelerated opengl was one of my only issues with it. That has been taken care of now, so I can honestly say that my impression of FreeBSD is a _very_ good one. I don't hate linux; I still run Gentoo. I'm just tired of bloated, unstable distributions, and the only ones that have approached the performance and stability I've seen in FreeBSD are Gentoo and Debian. Now, I'm sure there are probably others; I just haven't had the pleasure of using them as of yet. So, in conclusion, as a FreeBSD user I do not hate linux, but as a linux user I'm beginning to become frustrated with the state of distributions. Does that answer the question?